Prevention and Precision Medicine in Private Insurance: A Relationship with Strong Perspective
Since the time of Hippocrates, the best approach to health remains the one that focuses on prevention and early diagnosis. Preventive screening, also known as check-ups, should aim at primary prevention, that is, avoiding the disease and not at its presymptomatic diagnosis. This is the main reason that makes it necessary from childhood. It can even prove life-saving, as long as it is done at the right time and is personalized based on each person’s gender, age, lifestyle and medical history.
The dominant trend in Medicine today is Precision Medicine, also known as “personalized medicine”, an innovative approach to adapting the prevention and treatment of diseases, taking into account differences in genes (starting with neoplasms), the environment and the lifestyle of people. In line with this definition, Preventive Medicine is changing today. It is moving from standardized prevention programs to structured screening programs by age and gender, as well as specialized screening, depending on the history.
Precision Health expresses the new era of Prevention, adapting Preventive Medicine to the unique biology and life circumstances of each individual, with an emphasis on the “prognosis” of diseases before they appear. The goal is to prevent and manage high-prevalence diseases, such as degenerative diseases and their complications, which naturally accompany aging. Routine preventive examinations can be much better interpreted if their deviations are evaluated even within normal limits, instead of simply constituting therapeutic targets when they go outside the usual normal limits.
Precision Health services are based on two central axes:
a) The investigation of the genetic makeup and genetic peculiarities of each person, as a substantial predisposing factor for future disease.
b) The adaptation and individualization of the Preventive Medicine plan based on the unique biology and life circumstances of each individual.
A new philosophy in Preventive Medicine means taking into account a series of biological mechanisms that at first glance may seem unrelated, but in reality can lead to early signs of dysfunction.
As a rule, there is a clinically silent period during which pathophysiological mechanisms develop that lead to the rupture of organ resistance and the depletion of the reserve that each system of the body has had since our birth.
The personalized composition of laboratory tests, instead of standard check-ups, helps more effectively in capturing the current health status of each individual, but also in determining the trends for the appearance of diseases.
In this way, the predisposition to the development of a disease can be identified long before it manifests itself and, with a completely targeted intervention in the mechanism and not in the indicators, its appearance can be prevented.
The usual practice in the Private Insurance Sector to date is limited mainly to the needs of the pre-insurance check, with the basic packages of clinical and laboratory assessment of insurability.
However, it is obvious that the personalized and thorough preventive check-up can be a field for the development of new insurance programs, which will cover the individual needs of the insured, as a care and offer of health insurance.
Such programs could potentially be combined with additional support services, such as counseling on nutrition and exercise, smoking cessation and general lifestyle changes.
Private insurance can be the “vehicle” to make the “tools” of Precision Health accessible to everyone, with the aim of effective and continuous prevention and ultimately extending the healthy life span of each insured person.
It is preferable to insure health rather than disease. For Insurance to intervene positively and contribute to more healthy time is an excellent pursuit and an additional social contribution of its role, with better planning and valuable savings of resources, for both the Public and the Private Insurance Systems.