How Diagnostic Data Is Shaping Personalized Medicine

Healthcare is quickly shifting towards personalization, with treatment decisions becoming more tailored to each patient and their own health journey. Personalized medicine is only possible because of diagnostic testing, which is now expanding beyond detection and classification to help clinicians determine which therapy to choose and how to adjust care over time.¹

In this blog, we are going to look at how this shift in looking at diagnostic data is helping to shape the future of personalized medicine and what that means for both providers and patients.

What is personalized medicine?

Personalized medicine, or precision medicine, is an innovative approach to tailoring disease prevention and treatment that takes into account differences in people’s genes, environments, and lifestyles. As an alternative to the traditional one-size-fits-approach seen in most medical treatments, the goal here is to target the treatments that will get the best results for the patient.²

By implementing a personalized approach to medical treatment, providers can shift the emphasis in medicine from reaction to prevention. This can delay or even prevent the need for providers to apply more severe treatments, which impacts the quality of life and financial considerations for the patient.³

While it’s still an emerging field in healthcare, it has the potential to transform medical interventions by providing effective, tailored therapeutic strategies based on the genomic, epigenomic, and proteomic profile of an individual. It’s less about treatment and more about prevention.⁴

The role of diagnostic data

For years, diagnostics were used to help determine what disease a patient had, leaving the providers to implement treatments that were used for most patients and adjust them based on how they responded. This is largely effective for a population-based evidence lens, but it doesn’t necessarily account for any biological or genetic variability that causes some patients to respond differently to that treatment.⁵

Using a trial-and-error approach typically leads to worse outcomes for patients, like incurring adverse side effects of medications, drug interacting negatively with their bodies, and even the potential progression of disease while effective treatment is delayed.⁶

These days, diagnostics are helping providers make more informed decisions before the treatment begins. For example, pharmacogenomic testing helps clinicians identify which therapies are most likely to be safe and effective for a specific patient.⁷

One of the main ideas of implementing personalized medicine is to better deliver on the rights of medication administration, outlined as the right patient, the right drug, the right dose, and the right route. These checkpoints are in place to ensure that medication is correctly prescribed and dispensed for each patient.⁸ An effective application of personalized medicine relies on the availability of rigorous diagnostic testing to select the best therapeutic product to improve patient outcomes.⁹

The future of personalization

As personalized medicine continues to grow in usage and application, new technologies, processes, and tools will be introduced to aid providers in making better treatment decisions for their patients.

We have already seen enormous growth in artificial intelligence across the industry, which opens the door to innumerable possibilities for the advancement of personalized medicine. AI has a unique power to recognize sophisticated patterns and hidden structures to supplement diagnostic systems in a healthcare setting. AI-enabled clinical decision support systems reduce diagnostics errors while helping to support decision making for providers.¹⁰

As personalized medicine continues to become adopted across healthcare, physicians will likely have to look at personalized medicine from a sort of “global view” through 4P medicine. 4P, which covers personalized, predictive, preventive, and participatory approaches to medicine, will not be limited by describing symptoms and diseases, but also seeks to anticipate the onset of diseases, treat them in specific ways, and prevent them.¹¹

Personalized medicine is one of the new frontiers in healthcare, presenting new challenges and opportunities for providers at every turn. SEKISUI Diagnostics is committed to helping laboratories and providers by providing products and solutions that support better diagnostic decisions and better patient care.

References