Concepts of ‘personalization’ in personalized medicine: implications for economic evaluation

In my introductory blog post, I noted that genomics might present new challenges for health economics and called for more discussion about appropriate methods in this context. I didn’t anticipate a particularly rapid response, but just a few days after posting I became aware of a new article published in PharmacoEconomics that engaged with many of the issues raised in my introductory post. Titled “Concepts of ‘personalization’ in personalised medicine: Implications for economic evaluations”, this paper reports the results of a workshop which considered where extensions to standard methods might be required in genomics and is a welcome addition to the limited existing literature on this subject. We covered some similar ground in a related paper published in Pharmacogenomics last year, and it is heartening to see that this new paper has reached some similar conclusions and developed a number of these issues further.

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