Abstract

Themed sections in Value in Health provide readers an opportunity to learn more about a contemporary issue in healthcare, research, or policy from several perspectives. This special themed section specifically focuses on methods for moving the evaluation of precision medicine into practice and policy. Precision medicine is an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle. This approach allows clinicians and researchers to predict more accurately which treatments and prevention strategies for a particular disease will work in which groups of people.

In this themed section, we focus specifically on next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, which are the fastest-growing type of precision medicine technology.¹ NGS includes panels that test multiple genes for a single indication, whole exome sequencing tests that evaluate the entire exome (coding regions of the genome), and whole genome sequencing tests that evaluate the entire genome.