How personalized medicine can be good for your health and your bottom line

One of the biggest complaints about personalized medicine, which uses information from our genes and lifestyle habits to better detect and treat disease, is that it’s expensive — after all the cost of genetic testing still remains high. But personalized approaches to medicine have the potential to save you money and time in the long run, and here are three ways how:

1. Early detection can limit lengthy hospital stays.

With more information about our unique gene structures and lifestyle habits, doctors are better equipped to monitor and detect suspicious changes in our health. Early detection translates to early treatment, which for many diseases — including cancer and chronic disease like diabetes — can have a significant impact on patient outcomes and overall time spent in the hospital.

Assurex Health, a company that uses genetic testing for personalized medicine, found this to be true in clinical studies with mental health patients. They observed a $2500 reduction in health care costs per patient per year when patients complied with medications recommended based on genetic tests.

2. Personalized medicine can eliminate costs incurred from misdiagnoses and from taking wrong prescriptions.

Forget about repeated trips to the doctor and pharmacy just because of a misdiagnosis or problems finding a prescription that works for you. Added information about our genes and lifestyle habits helps doctors better predict the kinds of drugs our bodies will respond to best. This knowledge will minimize trial-and-error in treatment and its associated costs.

3. For treatments that are expensive, personalized medicine can make them cost-effective.

There’s no avoiding the fact that a number of prescription drugs and treatments are expensive, but personalized approaches to medicine can make them cost-effective. By pinpointing only those individuals who are most likely to benefit from a particularly expensive treatment, personalized medicine maximizes the chances for effective outcomes for those individuals, and minimizes what would otherwise be wasteful spending for everyone else.

Dhruv Kazi, a cardiologist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco, saw how cost-effective personalized medicine can be when he and his team used genetic tests to determine what type of medicines to give patients receiving heart stents. Patients who received more expensive medications, recommended based on genetic tests, had fewer hospital admissions over time, which brought down their overall medical costs. “If you have an expensive drug … rather than give it to everybody, the act of individualizing that therapy actually reduces costs,” Kazi said.

With investments in research and development rapidly growing, personalized medicine could not only change the way we manage our health but also the long-term costs of maintaining it.

Originally published at https://nilosoftware.com/blog