Economic Evaluations of Personalized Health Technologies: An Overview of Emerging Issues

Abstract

Personalized medicine seeks to integrate data on the entire dynamic biological makeup of each individual as well as the environmental and lifestyle factors that interface with this makeup to generate a complex, individual phenotype. The information about the individual's phenotype enables physicians to prescribe more effective treatments, hence avoiding ineffective treatments with known side effects, reducing trial-and-error inefficiencies that may increase health care costs on one hand and cause harm to patients on the other. Personalized medicine is generating increasingly tailored interventions that also need to be carefully assessed to determine their cost-effectiveness. Because the vast majority of conventionally applied health technologies are tested on broad populations and prescribed using statistical averages, the approach of personalized medicine may prove challenging for the conventional methods of economic evaluations because of its increasing focus on the individual patient. This chapter aims to bring a concise overview of some of the methodological issues related to the economic assessment of personalized medicine and the related outcomes research, which are only now starting to be addressed. It puts forward examples of economic evaluations of personalized medicine and highlights some of the areas in which future methodological work may be required, hence contributing to a growing debate on economic evaluations of personalized medical products.