The healthcare industry is quickly moving toward becoming more focused on precision medicine. This field of medicine uses information about an individual’s genetic makeup to prevent, diagnose, and treat diseases.

This personalized form of healthcare can lead to better patient outcomes because it does not deliver a one-size-fits-all approach to treatment. Instead, it considers an individual’s unique genetic markup to determine the diseases the individual is predisposed to and the best way to manage, treat, and prevent them.

As we move into 2023, it’s becoming clear that insights management will be essential for precision medicine to continue providing personalized patient care.

Defining Insights Management
Before getting too far, let’s briefly discuss what we mean by the term “insights management.”

In medicine, insights management refers to the process of gathering, analyzing, storing, and using medical data (or insights) that a life sciences organization collects. This data can come from individuals who are being treated and streams in from multiple sources, such as electronic health records, medical charts, physician notes, and other places.

As the Journal of the Medical Liason Society notes, insights can also come from more heterogeneous sources. For example, insights can come from field medal teams and advisory boards that need to be somehow linked and shared with stakeholders. Then there are insights collected from global health experts, who may or may not use a formal method for sharing their insights with the rest of the medical community.

As it currently stands, the insights gathered from all these disparate sources are often disorganized and, as a result, difficult to interpret.

The Importance of Managing Insights
As more information is gathered and stored, it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. That’s why having a formal insights management process will be essential for precision medicine in 2023.

The only way to understand the best treatment pathway for individuals and patient groups is to access and analyze data from as many different areas of the patients’ lives as possible. This will require gathering and analyzing an enormous amount of data. If that data becomes disorganized, it will be difficult to impossible to make any meaningful sense of it that will lead to improved patient outcomes.

One key challenge is finding ways to collect and store unstructured data, which makes up an estimated 80 percent of all healthcare data. Structured data, such as that gathered by electronic medical records, are already organized. However, unstructured data from sources like medical charts, referral forms, and physician notes needs to somehow get added to the structured data to complete a full picture of the patient’s journey.

At the same time, it will be essential to find ways to gather and organize insights from global health experts who don’t always formally publish their insights. This information must be shared with precision medicine teams that can use it to develop new treatments that benefit specific patient populations.

Conclusion
It’s clear that life science teams need to prioritize insights management if they want to stay ahead of the curve. Without an insights management process, gathering, analyzing, and using structured and unstructured data to move precision medicine forward will quickly become impossible.

References
Ginsburg, G. S., & Phillips, K. A. (2018, May). Precision medicine: From science to value | health affairs. Health Affairs. Retrieved January 23, 2023, from https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.1624

Graves, R. (2022, July 29). What could faster medical insights management mean for patient outcomes? THE MSL. Retrieved January 23, 2023, from https://themsljournal.com/article/what-could-faster-medical-insights-management-mean-for-patient-outcomes/

Kong, H.-J. (2019, January). Managing unstructured big data in healthcare system. Healthcare informatics research. Retrieved January 23, 2023, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6372467/