Even in the old pre-computer days any decent doctor kept meticulous records. They had walls of patient charts, and clipboards hung at the foot of each hospital bed, in which every action was recorded by physician and nurse. Such record keeping was one of the hallmarks of modern medicine. It allowed health care researchers to figure out what did, and did not, work.

Now the new computer, big data, Internet age is kicking such evidence-based medicine to a new level. And the recent White House Precision Medicine Initiative Summit, on the one-year anniversary of the initiative's launch, highlighted recent government and industry efforts to move forward the availability of anonymized patient data, letting researchers personalize diagnosis and treatment as never before.

"My hope is that this becomes the foundation, the architecture, whereby 10 years from now we can look back and say we've revolutionized medicine," Obama told the Summit, according to a White House statement. "Doctors have always recognized that every patient is unique, and doctors have always tried to tailor their treatments as best they can to individuals. You can match a blood transfusion to a blood type — that was an important discovery. What if matching a cancer cure to our genetic code was just as easy, just as standard? What if figuring out the right dose of medicine was as simple as taking our temperature?"
The president wants $309 million in 2016 for the initiative, most of it in the budget of the National Institutes of Health, according to U.S. News.

In conjunction with the summit, over 40 private sector organizations and a number of Federal agencies also made commitments to further the goals of the initiative. These include efforts to:

- Make it easier for patients to access, understand, and share their own digital health data, including donating it for research;

- Engage participants as partners in research, including returning results to them in dynamic, user-centered ways;

- Bring the promise of precision medicine to everyone;

- Open up data and technology tools to invite citizen participation, unleash new discoveries, and bring together diverse collaborators to share their unique skills;

- Adhere to strong privacy and data security principles; and

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