Dive Brief:
- Personalized medicine is already having a measurable impact on patient outcomes and will play a strong role in healthcare facilities in the next two years, a new report stated.
- Regulatory and cultural changes, such as increased data sharing and interaction with newly empowered patients, will be needed to advance the effort.
- The report draws on a survey of 120 healthcare professionals at institutions in the U.S. and Europe, plus leading experts in the field.
Dive Insight:
Released Thursday by Oxford Economics and SAP, the report focuses on what healthcare organizations and drug companies are doing to further precision medicine. Over two-thirds of respondents said personalized medicine is having a measurable impact on their company or facility.
Improving efficiency of care and lowering costs are the two main forces driving the shift to personalized medicine, the authors said.
While substantial investments are being made in big data and analytics, more is needed to build out IT capabilities, they wrote. Organizations grasp the economic benefits of personalized medicine, but need to develop business models that support this new field.
“Personalized medicine leverages broad data sets including clinical data and genomics to move beyond the one-size-fits-all model into more individualized care,” David Delaney, chief medical officer and head of Healthcare Industry North America at SAP, said in a statement. “To reach the full potential of personalized medicine, however, industry stakeholders must take definitive steps to invest in advanced technologies and workforce talent, adjust to new governance models, and accept significant cultural shifts around data sharing and standards that foster easy interoperability of information.”
In his 2015 State of the Union address, President Obama announced a major initiative to advance the role of personalized medicine in heatlhcare.