Much of the dialogue around personalized medicine focuses on the scientific and biotechnology breakthroughs we have witnessed in recent years, as well as the ethical, regulatory and reimbursement challenges facing organizations commercializing these breakthroughs. We have seen great strides in the molecular understanding of disease, resulting in many new diagnostics, therapeutics and treatment regiments impacting quality of life for many.

However, achieving the promise of personalized medicine is about fundamentally transforming healthcare.  This transformation is only possible through the synergy of healthcare information technology (HIT) with scientific breakthroughs in the molecular understanding of disease, novel therapeutics and diagnostics, as well as a fundamental redesign of healthcare delivery.  Leveraging data – in particular clinical outcomes information – from across the healthcare system will be essential.  This has major business model implications for many constituents in the healthcare ecosystem including pharma/biotech, health providers, PBMs and payers, and as a result their IT strategies.

Under this new paradigm, successful organizations will be differentiated by their ability to manage, integrate, analyze and leverage clinical, financial, claims and other biomedical information from across their enterprise and external to their enterprise.  Leaders will successfully use that information to improve quality of care, understand what value means in healthcare and accelerate the translation of research discoveries into practice by providing physicians, researchers and consumers with actionable data at the right time and place.

This presentation will focus on the essential role heatlhcare information technology will need to play to achieve the vision of personalized healthcare.  Specifically, it will explore the market and regulatory factors driving this imperative including the HITECH legislation, pay for performance and Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER).

The discussion will then address the specific changes needed to enable the move towards personalized medicine including identifying and validating novel disease markers, enabling more focused clinical research and ultimately transforming the delivery of healthcare.  Finally, it will explore in detail the macro-information technology implications for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and healthcare markets including clinical trials, electronic health records, health information exchanges and other health information technology.