Precision, preventive medicine innovations provide best care value

Preventative, personalized, precision medicine innovations have the potential to produce huge societal benefits, but the motivation to develop them is lacking, according to a recently published viewpoint in The Lancet. “Preventive, personalized, and precision medicine interventions targeted at reducing heart disease would have the greatest societal benefit, because heart disease is very common, and has a relatively large effect on life expectancy. Other diseases such as stroke or lung disease are much less prevalent and odder smaller opportunities for creating additional years of healthy life from incidence reduction,” Victor J. Dzau, MD, of the Institute of Medicine in Washington, D.C., and colleagues said in a press release.