Outdated Metrics in the Age of Precision Medicine

With the rapid pace of change in precision medicine, insur­ance companies and federal policymakers will need to adjust for far more variance in the ways patients are treated, even though insurance plans and federal policy, by nature, require a measure of standardization, according to experts who took part in a panel dis­cussion at the 4th annual meeting of Pa­tient-Centered Oncology Care, presented in Baltimore, Maryland, by The American Journal of Managed Care.

Panelists were not fully convinced that payment and federal policies can make the evolutionary leap with grace, given that government measurement tools are sometimes inadequate, and many ele­ments in oncologic care lack coordination and transparency.

“The challenge for us is how to deal with this infrastructure that’s very out­dated as we’re using it today, yet we need to build the moonshot vehicle with these technologies, with these policies; and that’s where I see a lot of room for cre­ativity,” said Kavita Patel, MD, a primary care internist at Johns Hopkins Medicine and a former director of policy for the Obama Administration.

The session entitled, “Navigating the Conflict of Personalized Medicine vs Pop­ulation Management,” covered a wealth of unresolved issues that pose challenges for today’s physicians, policymakers, and payers as medical science races forward and creates a knowledge vacuum that requires all parties to act with more nim­bleness, while shedding institutionalized methodology, which can inhibit the effec­tive delivery of personalized care.

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