President Barack Obama was delivering on a promise made in his State of the Union Address when he officially launched the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI), igniting intensive work by Dr. Francis Collins and the PMI Working Group this year. The promise is bold: nothing less than truly revolutionizing the way we develop therapies and treatments for patients across America. With the PMI, we can credibly claim that we will improve health outcomes for all. Achieving this vision will require the efforts of numerous healthcare stakeholders. Because the PMI has the promise to solve our most intractable health problems by harnessing the power of data, success requires recruiting individuals willing to share their personal information. These volunteers ? the 1 million Americans who will comprise the PMI Cohort Program (PMI-CP) ? are the pillars upon which the PMI will stand. The volunteers will need to understand the goals of the PMI, the logistics of what volunteering means and the specifics of why sharing their personal health data and biospecimens will benefit the health of future generations. With the right communications strategy, cohort volunteers will not only understand their individual importance to this cause, they will also be actively enthusiastic, and assist in the recruitment of additional volunteers from their communities. This is a proposal to help accomplish this feat through a multi- faceted campaign with a suite of outreach strategies designed to find, educate, and activate a cohort that is representative of the diversity of our country. It will require communications strategies that reach many thousands at a time, as well as multiple targeted, personalized micro-strategies. Messaging is at the core of achieving buy-in and making participation a matter of personal, community, and civic pride. As bold and large as the PMI is, recruiting the cohort comes down to the individual. Garnering this level of buy-in will require a team with expertise in not only communications and patient advocacy, but also with a record of achieving the level of trust needed to connect with individuals in a meaningful way and the ability to motivate them to take action. The team must have the ability to speak across cultures, ethnicities, and socio-economic statuses. We have assembled that team. And we would be honored to make the PMI vision a reality.
