Opportunities in the Economics of Personalized Health Care and Prevention

Abstract Personalized medicine is best viewed from a broad perspective of trying to use information about a patient to improve care. While “personalized medicine” often emphasizes the value of genetic information, traditional clinical approaches to personalizing care based on patient phenotype, provider and system-level factors should not be neglected. As these diverse approaches to personalization are examined, tools such as cost-effectiveness analysis can provide important insights into the value of these approaches, strategies for their implementation and dissemination, and priorities for future research. Such analyses are likely to be most insightful if they recognize that patient and provider behaviors are essential determinants of the value of treatments and that patient factors in particular may have large effects on the value of treatments and the need for interventions to improve decision making. These comments suggest three major areas of opportunity for economic analyses of personalized medicine: (1) traditional clinical approaches to personalized medicine, (2) multi-perspective studies of the benefits and costs of personalized medicine, and (3) the role of behavior in the value of personalized medicine.