What role can personalized medicine play in “bending” the health care cost curve?
A lot of personalized medicine is going to be about prevention. While that may not bend the cost curve overnight it is something that everyone agrees we should do more of, if we’re serious both about giving people a chance to live long and healthy lives and also reducing health care costs. Personalized medicine is all about trying to come up with ways to give people information about themselves, not in generic way, but in a very specific way, that will motivate actions that will help them stay well. I think that’s an exciting paradigm but we need a lot more information about how people actually take advantage of it – whether the information is family medical history which is a cheap, genetic test, or whether it’s DNA-based or whether it’s about environmental exposures. All of [those pieces of information] ought to be folding into an opportunity for every person, with their health care provider, to look at their risks and make decisions about how to reduce those risks. We also need to u
