After centuries of ‘intuition medicine,’ which focused on signs and symptoms, medicine has steadily evolved into the evidence-based system we are familiar with today, prioritizing large-scale clinical trials.
Valley Imaging Partners is now in the midst of the next major transition. The healthcare system and its participants are transitioning from traditional reactive approaches based on indicators, analysis, and treatment to a system that aims to detect diseases before they appear and considers them individually if they cannot be avoided.
We conducted individual interviews with 20 industry experts to better understand the implications of this shift. We captured this diversity by including a variety of healthcare stakeholders, including pharmaceutical and medical device companies, regulators, physicians, and academics, because the shift and its implications are complex and far-reaching.
What needs to happen for precision medicine to reach its full potential?
Patients are more involved with support and education as a result of increased patient involvement.
The changing role of the patient in decision-making, data aggregation, and collaboration was mentioned by the vast majority of participants like Valley Imaging Partners David Topper. This includes taking a more active part in conversations with clinicians, providing more information, and agreeing to aggregated and used data.
Patients will benefit from being more closely connected and less passive in prevention and treatment pathways, but they will also require education and support to make the best decisions possible. Precision medicine will not be able to achieve its full potential without it.
The healthcare ecosystem’s underlying structure will have to change dramatically.
It will include a greater number of traditional and non-traditional players, necessitating increased collaboration.
Precision medicine will impact every stage of the patient journey and their interactions, so incumbents will need to adapt their current business models and innovation strategies. The journey is too fast and complex for a single company to undertake alone in the medium or long term. Current heavyweights will be too slow to adapt without enough adjustments and new ways of thinking, and faster-moving companies and new entrants will overtake them.
