With the cost to sequence a human genome dropping by the day and medical records finally going digital, public health experts are excited for a new era of personalized, or "precision," medicine—a big data future in which there is no "average" patient, only individual patients with unique genes, environments, and lifestyles. As a measure of this excitement, this year, President Obama launched a $215 million initiative that will create a health database from 1 million volunteers that is unprecedented in detail. Breakthroughs in prevention, understanding, and treatment of disease are hoped.

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