article · Healthcare
Next-generation sequencing provides precise diagnoses and enables personalised cancer treatments, yet implementation gaps prevent many patients globally from accessing these benefits. Adoption faces obstacles due to differing levels of understanding and uneven coordination between regional and national authorities. To address these hurdles, a maturity framework addressing demand-side and supply-side factors was established to let international stakeholders self-evaluate their progress against a shared matrix. A survey distributed to institutional experts worldwide confirmed substantial variability in how next-generation sequencing is currently adopted. Resolving these disparities requires connecting national healthcare delivery with wider global policy initiatives. Improved alignment across national and regional strategies can support more rational resource allocation, build consensus, and establish the conditions required to expand patient access to advanced genomic diagnostics.
Advanced genetic sequencing can tailor cancer therapies to individual patients, but unequal access limits its clinical impact. By providing a structured maturity framework, healthcare leaders can identify specific barriers in their systems. This allows regional and national authorities to collaborate more effectively, align resources rationally, and establish the policy environments needed to integrate life-saving diagnostic tools into routine patient care.
The maturity framework serves as an evaluation tool for healthcare policymakers, health systems, and institutional clinical leaders seeking to systematically benchmark and expand genomic testing services. Rather than a physical product, the output is an applied policy and operational framework ready for institutional self-assessment, intended to guide infrastructure planning, resource allocation, and market readiness for diagnostic technology adoption.
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Radical new possibilities of improved treatment of cancer are on offer from an advanced medical technology already demonstrating its significance: next-generation sequencing (NGS). This refined testing provides unprecedentedly precise diagnoses and permits the use of focused and highly personalized treatments. However, across regions globally, many cancer patients will continue to be denied the benefits of NGS as long as some of the yawning gaps in its implementation remain unattended. The challenges at the regional and national levels are linked because putting the solutions into effect is highly dependent on cooperation between regional- and national-level cooperation, which could be hindered by shortfalls in interpretation or understanding. The aim of the paper was to define and explore the necessary conditions for NGS and make recommendations for effective implementation based on extensive exchanges with policy makers and stakeholders. As a result, the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) developed a maturity framework structured around demand-side and supply-side issues to enable interested stakeholders in different countries to self-evaluate according to a common matrix. A questionnaire was designed to identify the current status of NGS implementation, and it was submitted to different experts in different institutions globally. This revealed significant variability in the different aspects of NGS uptake. Within different regions globally, to ensure those conditions are right, this can be improved by linking efforts made at the national level, where patients have needs and where care is delivered, and at the global level, where major policy initiatives in the health field are underway or in preparation, many of which offer direct or indirect pathways for building those conditions. In addition, in a period when consensus is still incomplete and catching up is needed at a political level to ensure rational allocation of resources-even within individual countries-to enable the best ways to make the necessary provisions for NGS, a key recommendation is to examine where closer links between national and regional actions could complement, support, and mutually reinforce efforts to improve the situation for patients.
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DOI: 10.3390/healthcare11030431
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