A recently conducted study indicates that a personalized approach to medicine has the potential to save billions of dollars down the road in healthcare costs. The experts behind this say that $114 billion could be saved by targeting therapy toward those that are ill and those that are at risk of becoming ill, too. Right now, this is all conjecture, but it is based upon extensive research. The researchers looked at what is being spent on six major diseases: cancer, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, lung disease, and stroke. It then figured out how many of these cases could have been potentially prevented if early detection had occurred, and then compared costs. $114 billion is a huge number, but over the course of 50 years, the number gets even higher. The estimate is that the improved health that would happen over this time would have saved $607 billion.
Heart disease is the number one killer in the United States, and it is especially prevalent among the elderly. With personalized and precision medicine methods, these occurrences can be diminished dramatically, allowing for longer life spans and a higher quality of life. The strength of this approach is the fact that there is a large emphasis on prevention, and that means that more people will be healthier as they age. It also means that more people will be able to enjoy their senior years for longer. In fact, the research seems to indicate that fatalities from these diseases would drop by 10 to 50 percent if proper measures were taken.
There are issues with this kind of approach, though. For example, the senior citizen population is growing quickly, and there are already anticipated shortages in the healthcare and senior care business. For this reason, and others, there are few incentives for government agencies to adopt these practices. Current methods do not focus on the long term, but rather the short term. It is expensive and doesn’t address solving a lot of the problems that end up leading to a need for senior care. Because of this, the research team stated that more benefits need to be supplied to providers to encourage steps in this direction.
One other way that this can be accomplished is through the personalized attention given through in-home care. While this isn’t necessarily medical care, it does serve a similar function. The appropriate attention is given at the appropriate time, in a highly customized way that is unique for your elderly loved one. If there is an issue, it will be addressed in a way that is most beneficial to your family member, and not in an institutionalized, cookie cutter manner. This is especially true when you hire a professional service that has caregivers with a lot of experience on their side. The more time that your caregivers have spent actually caring for others, the better able they will be to adapt their skills to an individual, rather than just sticking with textbook actions. Going with a service helps you to ensure that this is the case, as their caregivers are more likely to have been trained and employed for longer.
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