Making “Precision Health” Everyday Health
With Three Thoughts From: Tim M. Jaeger, MD, PhD, MBA, Global Head of Diagnostics Information Solutions, Roche
For years we’ve been promised that precision health will be the future.
Major breakthroughs in labs and milestone approvals in 2017 continue to support this promise but, like many advancements in healthcare, it often seems slow-going – it’s still the “next big thing”, possible and progressing rather than representing reality for the majority of mainstream healthcare practitioners.
One reason for this may be that a vast quantity of complex data, systems and technologies needs to come together in the actual delivery of healthcare.
Clinicians and hospital administrators I’ve spoken with over the past year tell me that the information they regularly need to access is locked in individual systems and determining treatment for their patients requires a myriad of data, from biopsy results to MRI images to mutations found in cell-free DNA. In addition, thousands of academic studies are published each year, creating a constant flow of new treatment options that clinicians need to evaluate.
If we’re going to reach a time when “personalized medicine” might simply be called “medicine”, or “precision health” is just called “healthcare”– we need to break silos and form connections and partnerships that haven’t existed before.
That’s why today GE Healthcare announced a long-term partnership with Roche – a first-of-its kind collaboration that combines advanced analytics with in-vivo data from our medical imaging and monitoring equipment and in-vitro data from Roche’s biomarker, tissue pathology, genomics and sequencing portfolio. We aim to develop an industry-first software platform that uses advanced analytics and apps to enable faster decision making for physicians and individualized treatment for patients.
On the sidelines of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference today, I asked Tim M. Jaeger, MD, PhD, MBA, Global Head of Diagnostics Information Solutions at Roche 3 thoughts about this barrier-breaking partnership and when “precision health” might just be called...health.
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Why is it so important that different segments of healthcare come together?
Healthcare suffers from many silos. Different data types sit across multiple care settings and systems with limited machine-readable information. Many physicians are trained and specialized in specific diseases or organs. All of this adds up to many opportunities to make healthcare more cohesive for clinicians and patients. In the same way companion diagnostics allowed the targeting of specific medicines to those groups of patients most likely to benefit, now a new era of comprehensive digital diagnostics can bring together science, medicine, technology and data to deliver the next generation of personalized healthcare.
What are some of the first ways we expect to see precision health become a reality?
We see tremendous early opportunity in oncology and critical care. With the GE Healthcare and Roche alliance, oncology care teams with multiple specialists will have a comprehensive data dashboard to review, collaborate and agree on treatment decisions for their cancer patients at each stage of their disease. In the critical care setting, data from a patient’s hospital monitoring equipment will be integrated with their blood-cell, biomarker, genomic and sequencing data, helping physicians to identify, or even predict, severe complications before they strike.
In three words, what is your vision for the future of healthcare?
Patient-centric, data-driven, value-based