NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – A significant majority of Americans are not familiar with personalized medicine, but when told how it could be used to tailor treatments or to assess their disease risk, they believe insurance companies should cover such technologies, according to the results of a survey published today.
When the concept and practice of personalized medicine was explained to those who had not heard about it before — and examples were provided of tests that are already in use — around 65 percent of respondents had a positive reaction to it.
The survey, conducted by KRC Research for the Personalized Medicine Coalition, found that 62 percent of people did not recall having read or heard anything about the term personalized medicine. Even among the 38 percent who said they have heard the term, only two in 10 said they are very informed on the matter. KRC conducted the telephone survey of 1,000 adults in March.
“What we saw in the survey is that people have some kind of a vague notion of what it is, but they’re very unclear … they don’t have any concrete sense … and [their] knowledge is really, really shallow on the topic,” Mark Richards, KRC’s senior VP and management supervisor, told GenomeWeb Daily News.
Read the full, original story: Majority of Americans Unaware of Personalized Medicine: Survey
