How will advances in diagnostics technology affect the quality and delivery of American healthcare?
Burrill: We are moving very rapidly toward personalized medicine. The driver of this change isn’t just technology, but the payor community, which includes single payor-government healthcare systems around the world, insurance companies, and employers. These payors can no longer continue to pay the costs associated with a one-size-fits-all healthcare model where many approved drugs are ineffective. It has been estimated that about 55% of the drugs consumed in America don’t work for the patients that they were prescribed for. Also, 80% of all approved cancer therapies fail to provide positive outcomes for many cancer patients. If you take a closer look at this, you quickly realize that the cost of healthcare can be dramatically reduced by using diagnostic and personalized medicine technology to correctly choose the safest and most effective treatment options for different patients. If this was the norm and not the exception, I suspect most healthcare systems and third-party payors would
