Personalized medicine is quite possibly the greatest healthcare innovation of our time. It offers the chance to improve and even save the lives of millions of people. But it also presents challenges unlike anything the healthcare establishment has seen. It will take a new form of leadership — including, and especially, from pharmaceutical companies — to bring this innovation to the masses.
As the FDA puts it, precision medicine “is an innovative approach to tailoring disease prevention and treatment that takes into account differences in people’s genes, environments, and lifestyles.” Its goal “is to target the right treatments to the right patients at the right time.”
Rather than prescribing the same drug to patients everywhere, the healthcare system will be able to offer personalized solutions including gene therapy, cell therapy, radioligand therapy (RLT) and more. Some personalized medicine treatments include precision therapeutics. The field also includes pharmacogenomics, the study of how an individual’s genetic makeup affects their response to medications.
As promising as this new era can be, today’s healthcare providers are not equipped to order, receive and administer these new therapies. The challenges are enormous. To take just one example we’ve seen in our work, some new therapies involve radiation. Administering them requires retrofitting or building new facilities, establishing new protocols around interactions with medical personnel, and implementing new ways to collect and dispose of radioactive waste.
So healthcare providers will need to transform their operations. And pharmaceutical companies need to drive this change. In addition to providing the new medicines and therapies, these companies should provide a wide range of services, assisting healthcare providers with:
- Infrastructure: Pharma brands must work with hospitals, medical centers, doctor’s offices, and other treatment sites to help design and build specialized facilities. These spaces must be equipped for complex medicine administration such as radiopharmaceuticals and more. They also should be adjustable, so that as new personalized medicines are developed, the facilities can be changed if necessary.
- Staff training: Because these therapies constitute new fields of medical interventions, everyone who works in healthcare needs training. Doctors and nurses need to know how to determine exactly what to order for each patient, how to order it, and how to track and ensure delivery. They need to learn how to administer each therapy, what problems or side effects to watch out for, and how to keep the patient and everyone else in the facility safe. Meanwhile, everyone who works in administrative roles needs training in how to update and handle all medical records at each step, how to handle billing and more.
- Precision diagnostics: Personalized medicine does not only come into play after a patient’s illness has been diagnosed. Instead, it can and should be part of the new standard care path. From early on in the patient’s experience, healthcare providers should integrate advanced diagnostic tools, such as genetic sequencing, to explore the patient’s unique profile and health problems. This requires making new tools and technologies available to doctors, nurses, and others in their daily operations.
- Identifying candidates: While the goal is to build out precision medicine to the point that every patient has access, for now healthcare providers will need to select which patients are most likely to benefit the most from specific, complex treatments. To do this, they need criteria and protocols to follow. And they need to keep updating the criteria and protocols as new information and studies come in.
- Support throughout the made-to-order process: Even with all the information healthcare providers collect from patients, they need help ensuring that they order the correct, customized therapy for each individual’s profile. And at any given time, changes in the patient’s health status and/or diagnosis could mean that the precision therapy being ordered or used should change as well. A unified service offering that connects every facet of the process is required to support customers and their patients.
To make all of this work, healthcare providers need around-the-clock access to experts at the pharmaceutical companies that are providing these precision therapeutics. This means pharma companies need to radically shift away from their current business model. Instead of focusing primarily on delivering goods, they need to adapt to deliver a suite of services — including highly functional, easy to use digital tools and teams of people who can best serve healthcare professionals.
This is a whole new landscape. The role that pharma companies play is transforming. The more they do to become service providers in the personalized medicine era, the more they’ll succeed — and the more lives they’ll help to save.
Photo: sorbetto, Getty Images
