Measuring the Potential Health Impact of Personalized Medicine: Evidence from Ms Treatments

31 Pages Posted: 9 Oct 2017 Last revised: 22 Apr 2023

Date Written: October 2017

Abstract

Individuals respond to pharmaceutical treatments differently due to the heterogeneity of patient populations. This heterogeneity can make it difficult to determine how efficacious or burdensome a treatment is for an individual patient. Personalized medicine involves using patient characteristics, therapeutics, or diagnostic testing to understand how individual patients respond to a given treatment. Personalized medicine increases the health impact of existing treatments by improving the matching process between patients and treatments and by improving a patient's understanding of the risk of serious side effects. In this paper, I compare the health impact of new treatment innovations with the potential health impact of personalized medicine. I find that the impact of personalized medicine depends on the number of treatments, the correlation between treatment effects, and the amount of noise in a patient's individual treatment effect signal. For multiple sclerosis treatments, I find that personalized medicine has the potential to increase the health impact of existing treatments by roughly 50 percent by informing patients of their individual treatment effect and risk of serious side effects.

Suggested Citation

Hult, Kristopher, Measuring the Potential Health Impact of Personalized Medicine: Evidence from Ms Treatments (October 2017). NBER Working Paper No. w23900, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3049724

Kristopher Hult (Contact Author)

University of Chicago ( email )

1101 East 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
United States

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
36
Abstract Views
347
PlumX Metrics