Economic Dimensions of Personalized and Precision Medicine.

• Author: Berndt, Ernst R.
• Position: NBER Book

Personalized and precision medicine (PPM)--the targeting of therapies according to an individual's genetic, environmental, or lifestyle characteristics--is becoming an increasingly important approach in health care treatment and prevention. The advancement of PPM is a challenge in traditional clinical, reimbursement, and regulatory landscapes because it is costly to develop and introduces a wide range of scientific, clinical, ethical, and economic issues. The economic issues include: how information on accurate diagnosis and treatment success will be disseminated and who will bear the cost; changes to physician training to incorporate genetics, probability and statistics, and economic considerations; whether the benefits of PPM will be confined to developed countries or will diffuse to emerging economies with less developed health care systems; the effects of patient heterogeneity on cost-effectiveness analysis; and opportunities for PPM's growth beyond the treatment...