Clinicians and healthcare practitioners have a unique opportunity in advocating lifestyle medicine because patients see them as a reliable source of advice. However, there are still numerous technical and logistic challenges to overcome before personal “big data” can be translated into actionable and clinically relevant solutions. Clinicians are also facing various issues prior to bringing personalized lifestyle medicine to their practice. Nevertheless, emerging ground-breaking research projects have given us a glimpse of how systems thinking and computational methods may lead to personalized health advice.
This publication focuses on the challenges of translating “big data” as well as the importance of implementing a personalized lifestyle medicine program in order to empower patients to regain control of their health.