Opinion: Doctors could prescribe drugs more accurately — if they could get the data

We often prescribe new medications that were proven to be effective in rigorous clinical trials and were approved by the Food and Drug Adminstration only to find that our patients don’t get better.

Amazon tells us every day which books would interest us, and Google can chart the fastest routes to our destinations, because these companies have mountains of data on which to base their predictions. We could provide better care for our patients if we had information that would allow us to target treatments to individual patients.