September 2016

Viewing posts from September , 2016

More health plans want to pay for drugs based on patient outcomes

A survey finds that most health plans would like to pay for many of the highest-priced medicines based on patient outcomes. The findings suggest that insurers hope to get tougher with drug makers as prescription medicines, by some estimates, account for more than one-fifth of overall health care costs.

Specifically, the survey found that 63 percent of health plans had strong interest in outcomes-based contracts for hepatitis C treatments, according to Avalere Health, a consulting firm that last year queried 42 US health plans representing 161 million insured people.

See full article here

Molecule-based prediction of clinical drug responses in cancer

The relationships between molecular features and clinical drug responses lay the foundation for optimizing drug therapies based on a patient’s genomic context.

With the fast development and reduced costs of high throughput technologies, more efforts are made to identify genomic markers that can predict drug responses. As precision medicine takes into account the genomic variability of individuals in oncology practice, accurately predicting response to cancer drugs based on molecules becomes a critical issue.

Read the entire article in Oxford Academic’s Bioinformatics here.

Precision Medicine on a Growth Trajectory

Implementation of precision medicine programs may be limited today, but initiatives are gaining within the healthcare market, according to a new report from HIMSS Analytics on precision medicine.

“The initiation of the Precision Medicine Initiative has certainly helped bring precision medicine to the forefront of healthcare today, especially in research areas such as cancer,” HIMSS Analytics Director of Research Brendan FitzGerald said.

Read entire post in Healthcare IT