An Impediment to Personalized Medicine Commercialization is the Lack of Understanding of the Value of the Testing

Abstract

Over the past 20 years there have been tremendous advancements in technology in areas such as imaging, medicinal chemistry, data integration, the digitization of medical records, computing power and yet the medical delivery model is largely unchanged. The healthcare community now has a treasure chest of new tools that should permit it to be much more proactive, effective and thus produce improved outcomes at lower costs. Personalized medicine (PM), also called Precision Medicine by some, is the category in which all of these new tools can be grouped. While there are a myriad of reasons such as legacy infrastructure, lack of incentives, costs of adopting new technologies,  one of  the major reasons, is the lack of understanding of the value of such testing  by payers. Moving to a value based pricing model for diagnostic testing will increase adoption rate of PM, raise reimbursement rates for PM testing and improve quality of care at a lower cost for patients.  The end result of this will be tests that have a demonstrated benefit in PM business models and result in the acceleration of commercialization.