Increasing costs and aging populations are prompting health care communities to transition from just treating diseases to providing a more predictive and personalized model of care.

Providers, as well as insurance payers and patients, already recognize the need to move from a strategy oriented to treating diseases to one focused on early detection and prevention, applying increasingly accessible indicators of individual patient risks based on aggregated genomics information. These indicators are then used to develop treatment paths based more closely on personalized health care data.

Health care and information solutions providers around the globe are joining forces to develop technologies that bring together critical data from disparate sources to create precise and individualized treatment plans for each patient.

For example, collaboration between Siemens and Partners Healthcare draws on a concept called service-oriented architecture (SOA). Because of its flexible, modular and standardized nature, SOA may prove to be a core foundational tool that enables more personalized diagnosis, individualized and preventive therapies, and clinical workflows. 

In the coming decades, it's widely expected that medical knowledge about effective treatments and best practices will be a public domain. However, this will require systems that can deliver standards for medical informatics to physicians and nurses. It will mean equipping health care providers with an open, standard IT architecture so that they can begin to pull data, applications and people together. And, it will mean that the IT applications, infrastructures and organizations delivering these solutions must become more agile and flexible.

The challenge of improving information accessibility calls for fundamental, systemic changes to the way knowledge is shared and applied. Empirical, trial-and-error methods of treatment are not able to take advantage of the innovations in in-vitro and in-vivo diagnostics that have developed in the last five to 10 years. Consider that right now there are more than 25,000 genetic tests in different stages in the U.S. market. How can any caregiver stay on top of which tests to order, which series to run, and what kind of knowledge is available?

Moreover, research suggests that if fundamental changes are not made to the current system, the cancer death rate will continue to be about 190 per 100,000 a year¹ and about 325,000 people will continue to die in the U.S. of coronary heart disease in an emergency department or before reaching a hospital.²

A shift toward personalized health care

With the appropriate systems and processes in place, medical teams can have access to a wealth of pre-existing genetic knowledge and personal medical histories to determine the treatments and risk factors for illnesses -- and patients can receive individual therapies for common diseases to help respond more quickly to symptoms before they become life-threatening.

In coming years, doctors and health care professionals will utilize a whole new set of tools for diagnosis and treatment based on an array of genetic tests and clinical data to determine the best treatment with the fewest side effects. Drug developers will gather evidence from patients about who will best respond to a given therapy for a given condition, and regulatory agencies will establish standards so that health care providers can easily compare one therapy to another. Further, insurance reimbursement will likely be based on comparison data culled from repositories of best-practice information and patient treatment histories, to avoid cases in which money goes to waste on unnecessary, sometimes harmful, procedures and treatments.

Of course, a number of legal and social issues, most notably privacy concerns, will need to be addressed. And, providers will need to be willing to share information across infrastructures.

So, the question isn't if this new world is coming, it's when. Fundamentally, the industry's IT systems must be in a position to manage this new reality.