“As companies like Siemens integrate diagnostic and imaging systems with healthcare information technology, we move closer to a transformation in healthcare – achieving the true potential of personalized medicine,” said Miller. One such concept in advancing personalized medicine is companion therapeutics, in which, based on highly specific diagnosis, a treatment would be also highly specific, targeting the unique characteristics of a disease as it manifests individually, thus improving outcomes.

“What we will see,” explained Miller, “is that a group of patients will be selected from an entire population, and that subgroup of patients will be given a therapy that is specific to their molecular composition and to that of the disease. Our job, as an industry, must focus on characterizing a disease with great precision in order to develop companion therapeutics that we a priori know the effectiveness of a drug.” Administering the most effective drug to the right patient can also reduce costs. “One of the most expensive things you can do in healthcare is to treat a patient with a therapy that is ineffective,” said Miller. “If we can eliminate that possibility, then we can reduce healthcare costs and increase quality.”

Opportunities and challenges

• Personalized medicine offers patients treatments that are tailored their specific genetic makeup
• Streamlining workflow can lead to increased quality of care and lower costs
• Companion therapeutics is an evolving trend within personalized medicine