Partnering in a digital era

In today's era of personalised medicine, healthcare has evolved from mass treatments, which aren't effective for all patients, to medicines specifically targeted to patient groups based on companion diagnostic tests. Now, with the advent of more sophisticated digital technologies, personalised healthcare is entering a new phase, expanding from companion diagnostics to a more complex, holistic view of patient health generated from a wide variety of data sources. This web of data will require a new ecosystem of partnerships with healthcare and technology companies. "In the future, we will be using data for a variety of patient characteristics to determine the best combination of treatments to improve a person's overall healthcare," says Michele Pedrocchi, Head of Global Strategy and Business Development for Roche Diagnostics. Data about patients and medicines are already streaming in from many sources--in vivo diagnostics, lifestyle sensors, labs, electronic records, clinical trial data, genomic data, physicians, and patients themselves.