New technologies to generate, store and retrieve medical and research data are inducing a rapid change in clinical and translational research and health care. Systems medicine is the interdisciplinary approach wherein physicians and clinical investigators team up with experts from biology, biostatistics, informatics, mathematics and computational modeling to develop methods to use new and stored data to the benefit of the patient. We here provide a critical assessment of the opportunities and challenges arising out of systems approaches in medicine and from this provide a definition of what systems medicine entails. Based on our analysis of current developments in medicine and healthcare and associated research needs, we emphasize the role of systems medicine as a multilevel and multidisciplinary methodological framework for informed data acquisition and interdisciplinary data analysis to extract previously inaccessible knowledge for the benefit of patients. Creating specialised computer systems to integrate big data from multiple sources may help provide tailored future healthcare. A healthcare system that meets the needs of every individual needs the ability to collect and mine data precisely and efficiently. Olaf Wolkenhauer at Rostock University, Germany and co-workers have explored the requirements for developing this ‘systems medicine’ approach. Interdisciplinary teams should be established specifically to develop software, computational models and integrated datasets for use in healthcare. Being able to harness information from huge medical datasets could dramatically improve our understanding of disease, and allow scientists to examine illnesses from the molecular scale to whole body responses. Systems medicine could also allow doctors to investigate an individual's specific needs, trial treatments through computer models, and analyze data captured on patients' smartphones, to provide safer, more personalised heathcare.
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