In this review we will discuss the role of P4 medicine and e-patients (participatory, predictive, preventive, and personalised) medicine & e-patients in the context of general practice or primary care. We will review the state of the art knowledge of P4 medicine in medical care. In this narrative review we wiill identify studies that have discussed the role of P4 in medical care and will summarise the main bodies of primary studies and appraisal of best evidence on the use of P4 medicine in clinical practice.
We searched for P4 medicine using the following search terms: "participatory medicine", "narrative medicine", "P4", "patient-centric medicine" in Medline (Pubmed), PsycInfo, CINHAL, and Cochrane Databases of Systematic reviews. We did not restrict the years of publication but we restricted the language of publication to English and we did not restrict the outcomes or disciplines to capture as wide a range of studies as we could.
XXX studies met the selection criteria. The messages are summarised below.
No study was identified that specifically addressed the role of P4 or participatory medicine in the context of primary care. In general, P4 medicine is discussed in the context of genomics and post-genomics era. While formal study methods will need to be devised, emergent evidence points to the value of using P4 approach that would be complementary to and enriching for the practice of medicine. In particular, involvement of patients as partners and sharing of stories using narrative medicine would likely to be beneficial for achieving better outcomes in chronic diseases. More studies are needed to validate these claims using study designs.