Feb 6
2025
Access, Efficiency, and Economics: How Precision Medicine Fuels 2025’s Waves of Change
By Joe Spinelli, chief strategy officer, Aranscia.
2024 left us with raw emotions, sentiments, and uncertainty around how the US healthcare system will support both the commercial and political promises of excellence and value in care for all.
Faced with ever-escalating costs, and rate-limited access to effective care for an increasingly greying population, we are left with no choice but to embrace novel approaches to identifying, facilitating, and incentivizing proactive care improvement and efficiencies. The only thing certain about 2025 is that it will not be business as usual.
Initiatives to further the personalization of health care extend beyond embracing best practices for high-risk and high-cost cohorts – they also empower the broader population of patients and clinicians with access to evidence-based insights to drive both proactive and preventive benefits. The field of personalized medication management and the utilization of drug-gene testing (also known as pharmacogenomics, or PGx) can truly support a trifecta of improving access, efficiency, and economics.
What problems can personalized medication management solve?
Adverse drug events are the fourth leading cause of preventable death in the US, and downstream issues related to ineffective medications or unwanted side effects create a significant cost and care burden on our healthcare system. In contrast to one-sized-fits-all prescribing, which has traditionally aligned care providers and pharmacy benefits with a “standard” regimen irrespective of its assessed compatibility with the patient, personalized medication management programs use a combination of tactical diagnostic testing and high-evidence clinical insights to assist providers in optimizing therapeutic decisions.
How are biomarker programs like PGx being embraced nationally?
Widespread state and federal initiatives have recognized the value and benefit of improving the accessibility of PGx testing. Over half of the US states now have legislation in force or introduced to enhance coverage for biomarker testing programs like PGx, and they have overwhelmingly received bipartisan support.
While the federal legislative priorities for 2025 and beyond remain uncertain, key thematic elements of personalized care, use of evidence-based science, and operational efficiency are highly compatible with the key tenets of PGx programs at scale.