Personalized medicine offers a key component to delivering value in the United States health care system.
Denis Cortese, M.D, president and CEO of Mayo Clinic, explains personalized medicine.
doneDr. Cortese also delivered the keynote address at the Personalized Medicine Coalition luncheon on March 3. See address.
2 Comments
Personalized – It’s about time. I need it right now! Oxygen: 1 oximeter reads 89percent, another company’s values off the chart on the “bad” side??? On the 89percent I’d not taken metoprolol for 5 days and BP and heart rate up. The “bad” – I could not sleep/tossing & turning all night, but on all my meds including metoprolol in a.m. and cartia at night. I think there is a connection with the medication and the different readings???? Please respond. I drive 100 miles to Jacksonville and have had medical proceedures done there. Here at home the above was done.
Dr. Cortese has clearly put preventive (chronic) care into the forefront with the concept of “personalized care”.
I had completed a study of the U.S. healthcare delivery industry, particularly in California, by the mid seventies. The study was focused on chronic care as the best foundation upon which a newly engineered delivery system would be based, a system that was cost effective while providing the best in health care.
Today we are bombarded by the “single payer” argument to nationalize healthcare. However, my innovative study relied entirely upon pre-paid health insurance, i.e., pay directly to the provider of healthcare rather than continue with third party health insurance.
Always confronting any change away from acute care based upon the patient selection of a doctor will be the fact that physicians are generally in individual medical practices or in small groups organized around a medical specialty. The selection of a doctor is rarely made via any personal relationship with a specific physician. Rather, it is through recommendation by someone who has been a patient of a specific physician that motivates one to make an appointment with that specific physician.
Patients in general do not have any objective knowledge of medical preactice that would lead them to select one physician over any other.
Personalized care was a guideline in my study. Personalized care begins with the patient being motivated to accept responsibility for his own health. That is, the doctor, the hospital,the clinic nor the insurance company can rightfully or effectively carry that responsibility. Changing our current acute care to a chronic care system will provide both the opportunity and motivation for a patient to assume responsibility for his own health.
Lastly, the use of health screening on an annual basis as a mandatory part of the patient assuming responsibility for his health actually becomes the only meaningful “gatekeeper” in a modern system for healthcare delivery. Also, and Dr.Cortese understands this point; screening patients in a multiphasic testing facility, will improve initial diagnostic accuracy from a poor 20% accuracy to one approaching 100%. Furthermore, the rapidly expanding knowledge base for the human genome must be the fundamental science upon which medical diagnostics is built in any systems engineered delivery scheme.
Being involved in your own healthcare before you sense an illness will be intellectually stimulating while for many others it will become a family affair with an annual trip of the whole family to the Health Screening Center, Main Street, County Center, USA.
It is time to dispense with single payer hype and employ systems engineering for a total redesign of the American Healthcare Delivery Systems.
Eric Olsen
Los Osos, California