Balancing Value, Pathways, and Innovation in Healthcare

Powerful clinical decision support tools harnessing the potential of big data analytics may make it easier for physicians to set their patients on a standardized road to improvement, but the expansion of pre-approved, packed care may be doing more than just lowering costs. In places where bundled payments based on holistic episodes of care has taken root, these evidence-based, standardized clinical pathways may be having a negative impact on innovation and experimentation that can help those patients that fall outside of treatment methods that receive a payer stamp of approval.

While precision medicine, genomics, and personalized care are becoming big talking points in the research community, is the trend towards financial rewards for a relatively narrow band of evidence-based medicine limiting discovery by making less common treatments too expensive to use routinely?

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