Research initiative kicks off in the UK to diagnose chronic diseases earlier

Update in Diagnostic and Clinical lab testing

Add Your Labs provides updates on hot or interesting topics in Diagnostics, with an emphasis on clinical lab testing.

One of the reasons I became an entrepreneur and founded Add Your Labs, was so I can have a deeper impact on improving health care. I have been in health care for my entire 20-year career, mostly in diagnostics, a little pharma, and now diagnostics with the focus on technology solutions. I belong to the school of thought and focus my time in making health care better through Preventive and Personalized (P&P) health care (i.e., Preventing disease and Providing treatments that fit the individual).

I feel we can help with the P&P initiative by building the next generation in laboratory management software solutions that benefit medical labs. By helping clinical laboratories become more efficient while increasing quality and profitability, labs will be able to provide the best care possible in addition to reinvesting into their business. This investment will continue to improve and elevate the standard of care, which has a net positive impact on the overall health care system.  But this is not about us. This is about an initiative that I think is noteworthy.

In the UK, a new project named, Our Future Health, initiated this Fall. The program’s title on their website is: “Let’s prevent disease together”. How will they do that? By enrolling millions of people in what will be the country’s largest research program to “develop new ways to prevent, detect and treat diseases.” (https://ourfuturehealth.org.uk/)

So why is this newsworthy?  Because we need these types of research projects, at this scale, to truly change the way our health care system is oriented, which currently is focused on treating after the onset of disease and one-size-fits-all treatment strategies.  This model is not effective!

My hope is that along with new ways to detect disease earlier and identifying people at higher risk of disease, that they find more cost-effective ways of applying health care.

In my opinion, medical lab testing is at the core of preventative and personalized care. Medical researchers and clinical labs are already deploying the capabilities and expertise to help drive this initiative. I believe one of the problems is that clinical laboratory testing goes under-utilized. Under-utilization in the form of financial support (i.e. shrinking reimbursement) or medical support (i.e. the slow adoption of new testing options/technologies).

If you are reading this, you may be someone who follows GenomeWeb, which posts regularly about new tests and technologies being launched for many, if not most, of the common chronic diseases and health conditions, such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, and heart disease, all of which happens to be the largest cost-drivers in U.S. health care.

Chronic diseases cost the U.S. in many ways, including:

• Accounts for 90% of health care spend ($3.6 Trillion) (ref1)

• $750B is wasted and up to 80k deaths occur annually from preventable diagnostic errors and other inefficiencies. (ref 2,3)

• ·65% ($325B) of prescription drugs have minimal efficacy (ref4)

On top of increasing the utilization of medical testing technologies, investment into new technologies needs to continue to increase.  To realize this monumental shift in health care delivery, at least in the U.S. which has different incentive structures than other countries, we need to increase the amount that is being invested and spent on diagnostics. Move the billions on treating disease into preventing disease. Improve the quality of life while saving billions of $$$!

Our medical labs are at the core and will help drive this correction in health care!

But this is just one guys opinion!

As the chair of Our Future Health, Prof Sir John Bell, of the University of Oxford, said,

“[The ambition] is to try and create a sandbox for testing and evaluating these early diagnostic or prevention strategies across a large population of people,” said Bell. “And we’ll be able to use that population to help us evaluate these new tools, diagnose disease early, prevent disease more effectively, and intervene at an earlier stage.” (ref5)

References

1.      https://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/about/costs/index.htm

2.      https://www.pinnaclecare.com/forms/download/Human-Cost-Financial-Impact-Whitepaper.pdf

3.      https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/strengthening-clinical-labs.html

4.      https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-015-0494-1

5.      https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/oct/24/uk-scheme-to-diagnose-diseases-earlier-cancer-obesity-mental-health