Will P4 Medicine Be The Killer Healthcare App?
Portland, OR – Dr. Leroy Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology (ISG) gave the keynote speech today at Supercomputing 09 conference on the emergence of P4 (predictive, personalized, preventive and participatory) medicine. Dr. Hood has serious street cred when it comes to making predictions about the future of healthcare, having co-founded some twenty startups including Amgen. He believes that medicine will become primarily an information science in ten years with the convergence of personal genomics, systems biology and grid computing. These tools will help create billions of physiological data points for each individual, enabling the creation of predictive and actionable models to explain emergent behavior.
How does this vision translate to primary care? According to Dr. Hood, you will first sequence your personal and family genomes and then show up at your doctor’s office every six months for a wellness assessment. Your physician will use a handheld blood assay device to profile 2500 blood proteins from a pinprick sample. The new assays will identify disease-related changes to organ-specific, blood protein fingerprints long before you become symptomatic. New therapies will stem from personal banking of stem cells and new drugs to “reengineer disease-perturbed networks.” “All the current business models will change,” says Dr. Hood. The time horizon for this vision becoming a reality? “Five to eight years.”
Given that the average timeline for a radical new technology to become ubiquitous in healthcare practice is seventeen years, I don’t know if I believe Dr. Hood’s timeline prediction. On the other hand, if he is right and the technology were available inexpensively today or in a few years time, wouldn’t you ask your physician for it? Your thoughts?
craig@mhealthconsulting.net
Craig,
Great post!
I think that the stated paradigm for the amount of time it takes for large scale adoption of “radical” new technologies in healthcare is obsolete. Take wireless health innovations which offer the paradoxical opportunity to both reduce costs and improve outcomes. For this, and other reasons, we are set to see massive market growth in this area in just the next few years. The caveat here is that we categorize wireless health innovation adopted in physical fitness and healthcare delivery as being “radical” as compared to long-standing conventional modalities.
In my opinion, unless the stated example in this report has a very low price point and dramatically reduces healthcare costs (e.g. by preventing the manifestation of expensive-to-treat illnesses), it seems an unlikely candidate to become “the killer healthcare app”. We should also consider that there is already a problem with private insurers knowing too much about someone’s risk factors (e.g. pre-existing conditions) and dropping coverage which, unless resolved, would present yet another barrier to rapid adoption.
Thanks,
Paul Sonnier
Founder, Wireless Health group on LinkedIn
Co-Chair, Healthcare Communications SIG at CommNexus San Diego
Thanks Paul. My sense of Dr. Hood’s talk was that this procedure would indeed be inexpensive and use a new class of bio-assay chips now being prototyped. Assuming it all worked as advertised and detected disease much earlier, then that alone has the promise of lowering costs. I would be concerned about data privacy as well. That issue is only going to get thornier as time goes on regardless of any specific technology, so somehow it will need to be addressed in a general way.
Excellent points, Craig. I can definitely see how P4 (predictive, personalized, preventive, and participatory) medicine can become the ultimate healthcare app in the very near future.
On a related note, I just came across an analysis of the Dec ’09 PWC report, “The Science of Personalized Medicine: Translating the Promise into Practice”, written by Bernie Monegain in Healthcare IT News:
“IT helps drive $232B personalized medicine market”
http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/it-helps-drive-232b-personalized-medicine-market
What do you think? Is this basically a long-form reiteration of Dr. Hood’s basic premise?
At the end of the article there’s a salient quote of Gerald McDougall, principal in charge of personalized medicine and health sciences at PricewaterhouseCoopers, who explicitly lists out the four elements of P4 medicine:
“We need to replace our current focus on treating disease with a better approach that is personalized, preventive, predictive and participatory, the basic tenants of personalized medicine. Greater collaboration around personalized medicine should be a key strategy for health reform.”
-Paul
Yes, the article you cited summarizes the vision, with the emphasis on genomics being the big enabler.