Compared to the suggested clinical guidelines in developed countries, we found that the use of immunohistochemistry in Mexico is not well standardized, and the country’s clinical guidelines do not have a maximum timespan for the turnaround time. Our analysis suggests that there are three groups of patient trajectories within the hospital, corresponding to the time in which their tumor specimens were tested for immunohistochemistry markers. For Mexico, an upper-middle-income country with resource constraints in its health sector, our approach has the potential to identify and predict those patients that will have further complications in their care.
The costs for healthcare systems could be extremely reduced by implementing a strict supervision of immunohistochemistry turnaround testing in a digitized data setting. A focus on turnaround time, hospital logistics, patient adherence, and other factors surrounding biomarker testing will be extremely helpful in the implementation of a precision medicine strategy. Therefore, monitoring the trajectory of a patient in the hospital can help us understand groups of patients with similar characteristics, ultimately informing public health decisions.