Personalized Medicine will create many answers and solutions in healthcare, but will we have the money to afford it? I post quite a bit about genomics and personalized medicine on the blog here and the one thing it has in common with the rest of healthcare is cost.
The success of personalized medicine will arise when the levels of clinical and scientific data come together with adequate information and education offered at the point of care, from your primary care MD and add in the fact that they are compensated along the line as well and a reduction of red tape to accomplish this will allow for better health care for all, with risk management taking a back seat the first goal at hand. BD
Another challenge, he said, is the rapid rise in healthcare coverage, and that fact that around 45 million Americans are uninsured.
“The advent of personalized health care cannot take place, and should hardly even be thought about, outside the context of the present crisis in health care financing and delivery,” Leavitt said.
“An important element of the problem lies with the outdated system of reimbursement that is enshrined in the Medicare program,” he added.
First, he said, “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.”
Leavitt also recommends “closer alignment” of the work of the FDA and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. “In particular this pertains to the issue of standards of evidence, especially for products and services that reduce costs in the future by identifying disease earlier or enabling effective prevention,” he said.
