Recognized for his work on personalized medicine and prospective health care, Dr. Ralph Snyderman, chancellor emeritus of health affairs at Duke, will receive the 2008 North American Healthcare Lifetime Achievement Award today.
The award will be given at Frost & Sullivan's 2008 Excellence in Healthcare Innovation Awards banquet at 5 p.m. in San Antonio, Texas. The Healthcare Innovation Awards are presented to companies that have made substantial contributions to the delivery and management of health care, by integrating treatment with novel technology, practices and ideas.
"Personally, it's always nice to receive recognition from others, but more importantly... [the award] recognizes an initiative related to improving health care that we originated at Duke more than 10 years ago," Snyderman said. "I have a great deal of respect that prospective care is starting to get international and national recognition."
Snyderman founded the Center for Research on Prospective Health Care in 2005. He is also founder and chair of Proventys, a health care technology company that combines diagnostic tests with clinical data to allow physicians to tailor treatments to specific individuals. By predicting an individual's risk, such an approach to health care shifts the orientation of medicine from disease to personalized prevention of disease, Snyderman said.
"What most people don't realize is that the focus of health care today is taking care of people when they get sick... the doctor treats them, and people don't have access to the health system until they get sick again," he said. "The emerging capabilities we have for the first time in history [allows us] to be able to predict medical events before they occur."
Personalized medicine-which began as an idea about 10 years ago-is now both impacting the way physicians practice medicine and the products pharmaceutical industries develop, Snyderman said.
Prior to 2004, in addition to being chancellor for health affairs, Snyderman served as dean of the School of Medicine and James B. Duke Professor of Medicine. While he served as chancellor, Snyderman oversaw the foundation of the Duke University Health System, the Clinical Research Institute and the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy.
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