Precision medicine increasingly is a clinical priority across U.S. health systems, yet many organizations continue to face challenges scaling genetic testing into routine care, according to new research from the Center for Connected Medicine (CCM) at UPMC, conducted in partnership with KLAS Research and the Institute for Precision Medicine.
The analysis finds that precision medicine is shifting from one-off testing to organized programs in many health systems. But the move from “available” to “standard” care is still constrained by reimbursement uncertainty and the practical work of embedding genetic results into everyday clinical workflows and measuring outcomes—gaps that will determine how quickly patients benefit.
“Precision medicine has moved firmly into the mainstream of clinical care,” said Adrian Lee, professor of pharmacology and chemical biology, School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, and director of the Institute for Precision Medicine, a joint effort of UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh. “The next phase is about accelerating that progress so that it becomes accessible to all patients.”
The new report, “Operationalizing Precision Medicine: How U.S. Health Systems Are Implementing Genetic Testing,” builds on a 2020 baseline study from CCM.
Based on interviews with executives and clinical leaders from midsize and large health systems nationwide, the report finds that more than three-quarters of organizations now have a formal program, service line or institute dedicated to precision medicine. This level of implementation represents a significant advance from 2020 when CCM found that 69% of surveyed health systems had no deployment of precision medicine or only programs that had been active for about one year.
Despite this advance, leaders consistently cited cost, reimbursement uncertainty and operational complexity as the most significant barriers to wider adoption, particularly for preventive and population-based use cases.
Compared to CCM’s 2020 findings, health systems now report progress in deploying genetic testing in areas with stronger evidence and clearer clinical actionability, including pharmacogenomics, oncology, and maternal and fetal health. Many organizations have also expanded integration of genetic data into electronic health records and paired results with clinical decision support tools—capabilities leaders say are critical for extending precision medicine beyond specialty care.
“It is encouraging to see precision medicine undergoing a true evolution and acceleration that will have tremendous benefits for patients—a trend we are also seeing in our work with the Institute for Precision Medicine,” said Matthias Kleinz, executive vice president of UPMC Enterprises. “What is needed now is a stronger focus on cross-functional, intra- and interinstitutional multistakeholder collaborations to overcome the evidence and cost barriers highlighted by the research.”
The report also points to the growing role of artificial intelligence and advanced analytics in helping health systems scale precision medicine, particularly in clinical decision support, diagnostics and workflow automation, capabilities that were largely nascent at the time of the 2020 study.
The research was conducted between October 2025 and February 2026 and included telephone interviews with 21 precision medicine leaders from health systems across the United States.
The full report is available for download from the UPMC Enterprises website.
Media Contact: HSNews@pitt.edu