Informing patients of relevant health information and innovations: patient recall or annual physical?

Recently the NEJM published an interesting debate on the value of the annual physical (also known as “periodic health examination”) (Goroll 2015). “Today, because of the rapid growth of medical knowledge and the widening application of technology to medicine, there is a particular need for a continuing authoritative review of, standards for both preventive and therapeutic strategies. Some of these strategies are subsumed under the general category of the periodic health examination.” (Canadian Task Force on the Periodic Health Examination 1979). Although the current debate of the annual physical has narrowly focused on preventive strategies in healthy individuals and building patient-physicians relationship, recent breakthrough clinical innovation in many fields, especially in genomic medicine, widens the need of review to new effective therapy and diagnostics. This is the case because genomic medicine indicates new therapeutic treatments and targets, and the costs of sequencing have been decreasing over time.