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Some large payers with sophisticated infrastructure can answer their own questions – by analyzing their own data and assessing their broad “population situation” within and across multiple disease states.

October is Health Literacy Month, and if current events this year have proven anything, it is that health literacy is more important than ever. Before discussing the timely circumstances, let us first backtrack for a moment and understand this concept. Health literacy can be defined as an individual’s ability to comprehend and communicate basic health information. Recently however, the definition has been expanded to include both personal health literacy and organizational health literacy. Personal health literacy is the extent to which an individual understands health related information, which informs their actions. As for organizational health literacy, this is the extent an organization provides individuals with health-related information, so they can make educated decisions about their health. Therefore, these two pieces of health literacy are intrinsically tied to each other.

Go back 3–5 years and ask people what the major disruptive trends in healthcare would be over the next few years and among the usual suspects: AI, personalized medicine, measurable tech, you would have surely heard the term ‘Microbiome’ thrown in for good measure. There was good reason for this excitement and huge projected potential – advances in microbiology, diagnostics (especially the information systems required to understand the power and impact our gut flora can have on our health) had recently opened new possibilities for treating a number of conditions across GI, GU, and metabolic conditions – even some cancers. A number of biotechs were also advancing the investigation of targeted Microbiome therapies, with Seres Therapeutics one of those leading the charge.

Dr. David Schwartz will be presenting at the IADC 2020 Virtual Annual Meeting on a panel titled The Use of Genetic Testing in the Courtroom.