Engaging Health Care Professionals in Personalized Medicine: A Pilot Study Comparing Two Professional Engagement Approaches

Abstract

Given the emerging importance of personalized medicine (PM) in primary care, now should be the ideal time for engaging with health care professionals (HCPs), both physicians and nurses, about integrating PM into practice. The question then becomes: what is the most effective way to engage with HCPs about emerging technologies that are not in routine clinical use and which are unfamiliar to many? The overall aim of this pilot study was to develop and compare two professional engagement (PE) approaches for engaging with HCPs about PM to inform their development and design of a future formal evaluation. The first PE intervention was a structured in-person focus group and the second was an online version, also incorporating an educational component, but without group interaction. The pilot study showed that while participants evaluated both interventions positively, the in-person workshop consistently scored higher; however, recruitment challenges were a major obstacle for this approach.