Challenging Reality

This Health Industry Insights Perspective provides insight into the rapidly growing need to address patients with multiple concurrent treatment needs in the United States and globally. With its increasingly graying population, the United States has patients who are, more often than not, being treated for multiple chronic and acute diseases simultaneously. Because of the interactive nature of the human body, treatment of one disease can often affect concurrent management of other diseases present, whether related or not.

As our ability to understand disease at the molecular level increases, we are becoming more capable of developing therapeutics that should be able to directly address the root causes of disease. Several efforts are advancing at varying levels of maturity that have begun to recognize patients with simultaneous multiple disease conditions; however, we remain at a very early stage in the effective management of this growing segment of patients. Ongoing parallel medical infrastructure innovations (e.g., translational medicine initiatives, electronic medical records [EMRs], clinical decision support systems [CDSSs], whole genome association studies, and biological modeling and simulation advances) will help to accelerate progress and help to advance disease treatment and holistic patient management into a new age.