Investigation Toward The Economic Feasibility of Personalized Medicine For Healthcare Service Providers: The Case of Bladder Cancer

TL;DR

This paper explores the economic feasibility of implementing personalized medicine for bladder cancer, proposing a spectrum-based decision framework to balance cost, effectiveness, and resource allocation for healthcare providers.

Contribution

It introduces a nuanced, spectrum-based approach to personalized medicine decision-making and develops a mathematical framework for assessing its economic viability.

Findings

Highly efficient personalized treatments are less sustainable economically.

Less effective but cheaper treatments can serve more patients, optimizing healthcare objectives.

Personalized medicine feasibility depends on balancing cost and therapeutic effectiveness.

Abstract

In today's complex healthcare landscape, the pursuit of delivering optimal patient care while navigating intricate economic dynamics poses a significant challenge for healthcare service providers (HSPs). In this already complex dynamics, the emergence of clinically promising personalized medicine based treatment aims to revolutionize medicine. While personalized medicine holds tremendous potential for enhancing therapeutic outcomes, its integration within resource-constrained HSPs presents formidable challenges. In this study, we investigate the economic feasibility of implementing personalized medicine. The central objective is to strike a balance between catering to individual patient needs and making economically viable decisions. Unlike conventional binary approaches to personalized treatment, we propose a more nuanced perspective by treating personalization as a spectrum. This approach allows for greater flexibility in decision-making and resource allocation. To this end, we propose a mathematical framework to investigate our proposal, focusing on Bladder Cancer (BC) as a case study. Our results show that while it is feasible to introduce personalized medicine, a highly efficient but highly expensive one would be short-lived relative to its less effective but cheaper alternative as the latter can be provided to a larger cohort of patients, optimizing the HSP's objective better.