Zoomedia Blog
Personalized shopping, stock trading, and online portals - all have become hallmarks to our new information driven culture that has become increasingly focused on the individual. Looking beyond these innovations, the focus on addressing the individual needs of patients, or more commonly known as personalized medicine, has become a focal point within the debates of healthcare reform. But is personalized medicine really something that we can enact within the confines of the current IT infrastructure and patient educational services?
In its essence, personalized medicine can be seen as several corresponding tracks that are all intrinsically intertwined: help patients achieve the right diagnosis and prescribe the right medication for the particular individual and exact condition, improve on traditional trial-and-error approaches, enable patients to spot the onset of disease even before symptoms appear, empower patients to take action to preempt or delay onset of the condition, and to help identify a patient's predisposition to disease so that there can be more effective steps to prevent it. On paper these are all key components to the larger issue of healthcare reform and while many organizations and companies are making strides to address these goals, there is the larger issue of a unified and standardized IT infrastructure that will support them. Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it sounds. HHS Secretary Michael O. Leavitt outlined his requirements for the success of personalized medicine with four mandates that should be the basis for any industry reform:
"First, the base of interoperable health information technology is critical and remains far from complete. It is not merely a matter of electronic health records, but equally the capacity to exchange information securely. This is crucial for practitioners as the elements of care become more complex, and it is crucial for research and medical progress. Consensus-based standards are at the heart of this effort.
Second, as data accumulates ever-more rapidly and the demand for standards increases, we will need to focus on the question of what constitutes actionable medical evidence. It will become increasingly important to have defined standards of evidence that will satisfy doctors and patients as they make health decisions, and that will be useful for regulatory and reimbursement purposes. The third cornerstone is interoperable health information technology. Our health information base needs to be vastly better than at present. This includes information at the most fundamental level – the patient health record – as well as our processes for gathering and understanding data, and our ability to share information among providers and others in order to improve care.
Third, personalized health care will require new business models and reimbursement approaches. Our health care system is tilted strongly toward post-symptomatic treatment and volume-driven payment. But with personalized health care, we hope to detect disease earlier and prevent it more effectively. We will need to learn to quantify that value and reward it appropriately.
Fourth, personalized health care is about developing new kinds of information and services – but it must equally be about using that information properly. Physicians and other health care professionals need to be engaged in the process of change. And consumers will need a growing information and education base."
While these touch upon several complex issues, many within the industry point to not only the IT infrastructure but also to patient education as key hurdles to achieving the promise of personalized medicine. According to the HHS report "...a major hurdle for personalized medicine is a lack of ‘genetic literacy’ among members of the general public. Informed patients are critical to patient-centered care, but as personalized medicine techniques become more sophisticated and information more complex, caregivers will face steeper challenges in communicating effectively with patients of all education levels and backgrounds.” Clearly this unified system needs to structured so that it packages the shear volume of information in such a way that makes the data easily understandable, is shareable between multiple types of delivery mechanisms, and more importantly, actionable for all parties involved.
Ultimately it will be up to both the new administration and the industry to take active roles in working together to standardize the proliferation of information that ranges from genetic testing results to how data is being shared between online resources (e.g., Google Health) to the roll out of electronic medical records. Without touching upon the complexities that Medicare adds to this mix, the task of creating an industry approved IT personalized medicine infrastructure will be one that may make or break any reforms that Mr. Obama will try to make. Hopefully they'll take cues from how Target elegantly packages their goods and services for "main street" and apply that to good of the healthcare industry.
Tags: Personalized Medicine, Product Strategy, Investor Strategy, Global Strategy, Patient Strategy