The use of population health to manage groups of at-risk people within a population, which may filter down to individuals, may be waning as a newer, more precise health care takes off. As Yuan1  notes, “For decades, cancer treatment has been following the rules of evidence-based medicine supported by population data. Although many breakthroughs have been made, current treatments cannot adequately meet the increasingly recognized unique individual needs of patients.” Enter precision health.

Precision health “uses omic data within the context of lifestyle, social, economic, cultural and environmental influences to help individuals achieve well-being and optimal health.”2(p6) The goal is “individualized treatments to maximize the benefits of any particular intervention for one single individual.”3  This new generation of precision in health care includes precision population health, and precision medicine, among others, including precision nursing.

Precision nursing involves more precisely defining an individual patient’s needs in order...

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