Technology has been rapidly reshaping the healthcare market for decades, but lately it’s become clear that the era of one-size-fits-all medicine is increasingly irrelevant in today’s customized culture.
One of the fastest-growing markets in healthcare is personalized medicine, and it’s an area that investors should carefully prioritize when considering market growth for the next decade. Rapid advances in this field, also called precision medicine, because of its ability to precisely target and provide solutions for complex issues in individuals.
What is personalized medicine? Precision, or personalized medicine provides for the customization of targeted treatments in patients, by using a wide body of data and diagnostics to provide the best care for each patient as an individual. This level of consideration given to the differences in individual’s prior medical histories, genetics, and more allows people to get the correct care for their unique circumstances, without wasting time and money on generalized treatments that are not optimally effective for people with different medical histories or genetic risk factors.
Personalized medicine involves and benefits a wide range of groups and industries, from patients, consumers and healthcare providers, to academic researchers, biopharmaceutical companies, and advocacy groups.
While the COVID-19 situation has upended many markets in the global economy, the field of personalized medicine is one that’s absolutely thriving under these new pressures. In fact, the field of personalized medicine has great potential for developing maximally effective treatments for COVID, because they can target specific genetic markers in individuals, and offer different solutions depending on their data analysis.
This makes treatment plans more likely to be effective the first time, which saves time, money, and sometimes, the lives of our patients.
The potential for precision medicine’s market growth will only increase, as the prohibitive costs of health care continue to pose challenges for both individuals and insurance payors.
In the keynote speech delivered by Jöerg Michael Rupp at the Global Bio Conference this September, he remarked that the personalized medicine market has the potential to create a sustainable healthcare environment, because of how efficient it allows medical care providers to be in allocating viable resources.
He further commented that the abundance of data and diagnostic information within healthcare industries could be leveraged to provide even more statistical analysis, which will accelerate the implementation of additional precision medicine practices.
Analysis of information gathered from a variety of technology-based sources, including electronic medical records, mobile apps, and diagnostic surveys, can bring needed insights into the far-reaching effects of medical decision-making, including opportunity costs and overall marketable value of new treatments and medications as they apply to individuals.
As medical care providers work to increase the accessibility of personalized medicine, it will be necessary to collaborate with government regulators and policymakers to help implement widespread adaptation of new tools and technologies.
Insurance companies and healthcare regulations must evolve and shift toward managing smaller patient populations based on their genetic profiles, and new laws and policies will need to be created that incentivize new avenues of research, to further increase the acceptance and adoption of personalized medicine technologies.
Over time, this will further accelerate the market potential for personalized medicine as the emerging gold standard in modern health care.
Why is the personalized medicine market so powerful, exactly? Because for many patients, a specific treatment or medication can be tailored to their unique genetic markers as well as their pattern or groups of symptoms. This means major savings not only in terms of cost, but also time and effort spent on finding a custom-tailored course of treatment for individuals. Instead of treating the diagnosis or symptom set, a doctor who practices personalized medicine is able to treat the individual persons in their care.
COVID-19 has taught us that healthcare solutions do not exist in a vacuum, and that any treatment, medication, or protocol must be able to withstand the test of value in terms of its socio-economic viability.
In terms of consistency, there is no single source or monitoring system to handle coronavirus testing – and digital automation would greatly streamline the process, making it more straightforward to get fast, traceable answers. Personalized medicine requires a large amount of data inputs to work efficiently, but it’s clear that applying the rigors of automation to medical data sets results in dramatically more organized and actionable results for healthcare providers to work with.
Major benefits of the advances in personalized medicine markets
Thanks to advanced analytic techniques and AI, we are gaining new insights about the ways in which not only genetics, but the biological and environmental factors which affect expression of those genetics, influence a patient’s risk of illness, as well as how they respond to certain treatments. This in-depth analysis allows us to further explore the field of preventive medicine, which is critically important to the future.
Additionally, personalized medicine greatly reduces the number of adverse drug reactions in patients, which is currently one of the top causes of death in the United States. Finally, applying personalized medicine technologies can unlock previously undiscovered uses for existing medicines, thereby finding new candidates for treatment.
The field of personalized medicine is expanding rapidly and in diverse directions, from biotechnology to diagnostic and remote treatment advances. The market potential for personalized medicine is undeniably oriented toward exponential growth during the coming years, and is quite possibly defining the newest horizons of quality health care.
Catherine is a yoga teacher, wild forager, and founding mother of the Homestead Guru.
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