Healthcare Reform: It is Getting Personal

Abstract

Healthcare reform must deal with the challenge of reducing the cost of care while embracing the opportunity to improve care delivery. Personalized medicine will be key to developing new care models. These models will provide coordinated and continuous care delivered by a team, with the individual patient as the central member of the team. Clinical effectiveness research will identify the best care models and reduce variation for populations of patients with a given disease. Personalized medicine will apply ‘big science ‘omics‘ with a systems biology approach to define disease networks, allowing us to add back appropriate variation in care for the individual. This effort will be enhanced by the electronic health record, which, combined with deep analytics, will capture detailed phenotypic data matched with the genotype. We are at the beginning of this journey and, despite a variety of technical, economic and societal hurdles, we cannot afford to fail.

KEYWORDS::

• accountable patient care
• analytics
• electronic health record
• healthcare reform
• ‘omics
• personalized medicine
• whole-genome sequencing

Financial & competing interests disclosure

The author has no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.