Personalized Medicine: A doorway to an effective health care delivery system?

Abstract

There is a growing interest in Personalized
Medicine. Even if we call it “Precision
Medicine”, the principle of targeting treatments
and prevention for each patient remains
the same. Supporting a unique diagnosis and
therapeutic strategy for each patient requires
the healthcare delivery system to embrace
care customization as its overall perspective.
Personalization of clinical strategies needs to
be accompanied by the customization of the
healthcare organizations themselves. From a
management perspective, the need for care
customization refers to the classical notion
of “mass customization”. Mass customization
which is already applied in other sectors,
is defined as “the development of tailored
services to meet consumers’ diverse and changing
needs at near mass production prices”.1
1. Pine BJ. Mass Customization: The New Frontier in
Business Competition. Boston: Harvard Business Press,
1993.
As healthcare organizations face rising costs
and demand for better quality, the need to
consider such a perspective is crucial.