Diagnostic industry – The blooming rose with lots of thorns

Diagnostic industry, the backbone of the medical fraternity, is growing at a very fast pace to meet the demand of clinicians and the common man, whose medical knowledge is increasing day by day from varied types of sources eg social media platforms.

Diagnosis of any disease and monitoring of health status largely depends on the accurate and precise test results, necessitating the supervision of all the released reports by a qualified medical practitioner having knowledge of correlation of the results with the clinical condition of the patient.

Considering the severity of the last two waves of COVID-19, everyone is living in an era of great fear, and even a mild deviation from the normal condition alarms the person to rule out any illness by a series of investigations. In this situation, the responsibility is on the shoulders of laboratory physicians to fulfil the need of society by providing them reliable test results. And for that, the good quality of reagent, calibrator, control material, specimen receptacle, software, equipment along with qualified and trained manpower is of prime importance. These all in vitro diagnostic devices are flooding the market with a high degree of competition. But a trained person is the only key to unlock the right result from the right IVD along with the minimal cost of the test.

Looking into the opportunity of business, a lot of players are entering into this diagnostic industry and in near future, we will see many isolated centers and chains of diagnostic companies. In such a situation, it becomes difficult to choose the right laboratory for a common man.

In my view, the authenticity of test results should be the sole criteria for the selection of any laboratory. Patients should be educated about the process flow of the laboratory so that they could not be fooled by mushrooming pseudo-pathology labs where reports are generated without testing samples. In the same way, it is the responsibility of the qualified laboratory physician to choose the appropriate reagents and consumables for the testing after proper verification of results. Quality costs but the life of patients cannot be compromised for the sake of profit.

There are many third parties to access the quality of test results released like NABL, CAP, ISO, NABH, etc which makes it easy to choose the laboratory for a layman.

The pre-analytical part (the chain of events before testing of sample in the lab like test ordering, condition before collection, proper collection, and pre-testing processing) is the most important step in testing as it influences the results most. No matter how big or good the lab is, if the sample collection is not up to the mark the results can never be accurate.

Nowadays, there is great influence by the government too on the diagnostic industry, in the form of controlling the price.

Sometimes, the decided prices are so low that it is not possible to run the test. In such a situation, the patient should be conveyed the same rather than using compromised reagents.

In summary, diagnostic industry looks like a blooming rose with lots of profit, but the main role of this industry is to provide accurate results to the patient so that their treatment can be optimized based on these results, which may demand a lot of efforts and unseen expenses, along with cut-throat competitive prices in the
market.