The microeconomics of personalized medicine: today's challenge and tomorrow's promise.

'Personalized medicine' promises to increase the quality of clinical care and, in some cases, decrease health-care costs. Despite this, only a handful of diagnostic tests have made it to market, with mixed success. Historically, the challenges in this field were scientific.

The "new economics" of clinical quality improvement: the case of community-acquired pneumonia.

Hospitals and health systems have developed substantial infrastructure, at significant expense, to improve care quality and support the collection and distribution of quality metrics. Yet providers often have little understanding of what return, if any, they have earned on the investment because they typically view quality improvement efforts simply as a cost of doing business. After analyzing data from 10,512 patients with community-acquired pneumonia, we found that better performance on two quality measures was associated with shorter length of stay and improved financial performance.