January 11, 2023 – Your customers are getting the lab message. Slowly but surely as a result of your consulting and collaborative work with your key lab manufacturers, new labs are being established, and existing labs are growing their testing portfolio.
Where is the proof? From 2021 to 2022, the number of CLIA-waived labs, which is the sweet spot for point of care labs, grew from 211,227 to 246,258 – a growth of about 16.6%. In the POL market, over 4,500 new waived labs were established during that time. Considering this growth took place as the COVID pandemic gripped the U.S., the number of new waived labs is even more impressive. At the same time, moderate complexity labs grew slightly, to over 34,000. As a very positive side note, the number of CLIA moderate complexity lab numbers has been dropping the last few years, and the latest data represents a reversal. Today I estimate that there are about 13,000 hematology systems in place in the POL, leading to a lot of opportunity. Your efforts are making it happen.
Yes, practice size and specialty dictate which waived tests are appropriate for the POL, but many tests make sense across the board for most POLs. Your well-equipped waived lab should be performing rapid tests for hCG, flu, strep, RSV and COVID at least, ideally on a reader system or even a molecular platform. Urinalysis and lipid tests help round out the urgently needed waived tests. Check the box if most of your customers are using these tests and give yourself a gold star if they are also doing cardiac rapids.
So where do we go from here? Good question.
Read more in the latest issue of Repertoire Magazine.