Personalized Dosing – It’s here, but how do we do it?

Dosing medicines correctly is challenging, and varies depending upon which methods or algorithms are chosen by each healthcare practitioner.

We require a personalized dose as every individual absorbs and clears medicines at different rates. If everyone takes the same medicine dose, some will end up with unwanted side effects, while others will not gain any therapeutic benefit.

Individualized dosing ensures patients get the right dose, improving their clinical outcomes and reducing healthcare costs.

How do I Personalize a Dose?

To determine a personalized medicine dose, DoseMe requires a small amount of patient information, such as weight, sex, prior doses of medicine and laboratory results including clotting time, or drug concentration. This information, together with DoseMeRx, calculates a personalized dose for an individual patient.

The Science Behind Personalized Dosing

To calculate a personalized medicine dose, we need to work out how an individual’s body is absorbing, processing and clearing a medicine.

In order to do this, an algorithm combines an individual’s personal information such as weight and age, doses given, and how they have previously responded to therapy. Combining this information then allows calculation of the most effective dose to reach a desired therapeutic target.

This method is known as Bayesian dose forecasting, and has been shown to significantly improve the percentage of patients that reach their therapeutic target. Not surprisingly, reaching the therapeutic target significantly improves outcomes for patients, and improving outcomes lowers length of stay and therefore cost.

This has been shown in a wide range of therapeutic trials where the use of Bayesian dosing to aid hospitals in reaching their therapeutic targets has resulted in a wide-ranging series of benefits. These different benefits have been shown in independent trials to include:

• Decrease mortality for gram-negative sepsis by 50%
• Increase leukemia survival by 15%
• Halve reported side-effects of chemotherapy
• Double warfarin patients in the therapeutic range
• Demonstrated cost benefit ratio of 4:1 to 52:1
• Save more than $2,500 USD per patient on hospital costs
• Reduce stay length by up to 16 days
• Halve the number of laboratory tests required

Of course, we cannot promise that every hospital that uses DoseMe will receive the same, identical benefits to the hospitals above, because this naturally depends on a range of factors. What Bayesian dosing can promise, however, is that it will enable you to more frequently, more regularly, and more quickly reach your therapeutic targets, and through this, improve your clinical outcomes.