Personalizing medical treatment

Via EurekAlert!, electrical engineers are working on personalizing medical treatment.  I find this to be an excellent development, as anytime someone with an engineering bent starts working on a problem, we usually see good progress in the field.   I think one of the current problems with medicine today is that it is almost treated as an art.  I read a couple of weeks ago about a study done in Chicago on how implementing quality control measures, i.e. checklists and things of that nature, would greatly benefit the outcomes of cardiac patients, as the study found that in a number of instances that people forgot to do things needed for a better outcome for the patient.  Now this is not necessarily the fault of the doctors or nurses, as people in this profession are currently very over-worked, but having something as simple as a checklist to go by would prevent this kind of error.  While it would seem to be impersonal, and most patients like the personal touch, it's stupid not to do something that works.  Yet again, we could learn a lot in this area from what the Japanese taught us in the automobile industry 50 years ago.

This would apply to "personalizing" medicine as well, as the personalization part just means that the treatments that apply to your particular condition are applied, but the QA/QC controls should still be in place in how we determine what exactly your condition is, and then what treatments are applied once that is known.