Operationalizing Precision Medicine: How U.S. Health Systems Are Implementing Genetic Testing

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Research finds precision medicine programs are gaining ground at health systems but challenges to wider adoption remain.

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 a research report from the Center for Connected Medicine (CCM) at UPMC.

Titled, “Operationalizing Precision Medicine: How U.S. Health Systems Are Implementing Genetic Testing,” the report can be downloaded by completing the form at the bottom of this page.

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, mature programs in many health systems.

Despite this progress, the move from “available” to “standard” care in precision medicine 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, PhD, 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.”

Precision Medicine Programs Have Advanced Since 2020

Based on interviews with executives and clinical leaders from midsize and large health systems nationwide, “Operationalizing Precision Medicine” 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 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.

However, leaders in the new survey 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.

Greater Collaboration is Essential to Growing Precision Medicine

Many organizations have also expanded integration of genetic data into electronic health records (EHRs) 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, PhD, DVM, executive vice president of UPMC Enterprises. “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.”

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.

Next Steps

• Download the report by completing the form below.
• Learn more about the Institute for Precision Medicine.
• Read about our precision diagnostics portfolio company Precede Biosciences.