Economic Evaluations of Personalized Health
Technologies: An Overview of Emerging
Issues
Ana Bobinac and Maja Vehovec
Abstract Personalized medicine seeks to integrate data on the entire dynamic
biological makeup of each individual as well as the environmental and lifestyle
factors that interface with this makeup to generate a complex, individual phenotype.
The information about the individual’s phenotype enables physicians to prescribe
more effective treatments, hence avoiding ineffective treatments with known side
effects, reducing trial-and-error inefficiencies that may increase health care costs on
one hand and cause harm to patients on the other. Personalized medicine is
generating increasingly tailored interventions that also need to be carefully assessed
to determine their cost-effectiveness. Because the vast majority of conventionally
applied health technologies are tested on broad populations and prescribed using
statistical averages, the approach of personalized medicine may prove challenging
for the conventional methods of economic evaluations because of its increasing
focus on the individual patient. This chapter aims to bring a concise overview of
some of the methodological issues related to the economic assessment of person-
alized medicine and the related outcomes research, which are only now starting to
be addressed. It puts forward examples of economic evaluations of personalized
medicine and highlights some of the areas in which future methodological work
may be required, hence contributing to a growing debate on economic evaluations
of personalized medical products.
Ana Bobinac, Ph.D., Institute of Health Policy and Management & the Institute for Health
Technology Assessment, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
Professor Maja Vehovec, Ph.D., The Institute of Economics, Zagreb, Croatia.
A. Bobinac, Ph.D. (*)
Institute of Health Policy and Management & the Institute for Health Technology Assessment,
Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail:[email protected]
M. Vehovec, Ph.D.
The Institute of Economics, Zagreb, Croatia
e-mail:[email protected]
©Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
N. Bodiroga-Vukobrat et al. (eds.),Personalized Medicine,Europeanization and
Globalization 2, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39349-0_7
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