Precision medicine programs are maturing, according to a research report from the Center for Connected Medicine (CCM) at UPMC, yet many organizations continue to face challenges scaling genetic testing into routine care. They report being constrained by reimbursement uncertainty and the practical work of embedding genetic results into everyday clinical workflows and measuring outcomes.

The report, conducted in partnership with KLAS Research and the Institute for Precision Medicine between October 2025 and February 2026, included telephone interviews with 21 health system precision medicine leaders.

The report finds that more than three-quarters of organizations now have a formal program, service line, or institute dedicated to precision medicine. That is a big jump from 2020 when a previous CCM survey found that 69% of surveyed health systems had no deployment of precision medicine or programs that had been active for only about one year.

“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, Ph.D., D.V.M., executive vice president of UPMC Enterprises, in a statement. “What is needed now is a stronger focus on cross-functional, intra- and inter-institutional multi-stakeholder collaborations to overcome the evidence and cost barriers highlighted by the research.”

Many organizations have also expanded integration of genetic data into EHRs and paired results with clinical decision support tools, capabilities leaders say are critical for extending precision medicine beyond specialty care.

The report, titled “Operationalizing Precision Medicine: How U.S. Health Systems Are Implementing Genetic Testing,” 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 the report notes were largely nascent at the time of the 2020 study.

Interviewed leaders describe several markers that differentiate early-stage programs from more mature ones:
Governance: Moving from ad hoc initiatives to formal committees or institutes with defined accountability.
Workflow: Increasing use of standardized ordering pathways and decision support to reduce variation across clinicians and sites.
Interpretation capacity: Stronger genetics/pharmacy support models (e.g., genetic counselors, pharmacists, centralized review).
Measurement: Shifting from counting number of tests performed to demonstrating outcomes and downstream impact.
Equity and access: Formal strategies to reduce affordability barriers and proactively reach underserved populations.

The report used UPMC itself as an example of what is possible. Through the PreCISE-Rx program there, pharmacogenomics is built into the electronic health record and supported by clinical decision tools that help guide prescribing across cardiology, oncology, behavioral health, infectious disease, surgery, and primary care. The result is more precise medication decisions based on each patient’s genetic profile, one of the clearest examples of precision medicine becoming routine in clinical practice, the study claims.

In primary care, the UPMC Primary Care Precision Medicine Center is integrating genetics, counseling, and individualized risk assessment into preventive and longitudinal care. In oncology, the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center is using sequencing of cancers both from blood and tissue to monitor disease and direct therapy. 

Leaders in the new survey cited cost, reimbursement uncertainty, and operational complexity as the most significant barriers to wider adoption, particularly for preventive and population-based use cases.