NEW YORK – Concierge phlebotomy, the place a phlebotomists goes to a affected person’s residence or office, has been round for years, however within the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift towards extra home-based testing, such companies are receiving elevated consideration.
According to proponents, concierge phlebotomy companies provide not solely improved affected person comfort but in addition the potential to enhance affected person outcomes and can be key to facilitating anticipated upticks in telehealth and distant testing.
Traditionally, residence phlebotomy has been used for home-bound sufferers, mentioned Michael Eller, assistant vice president, enterprise technique and growth at Northwell Health Labs, which companies the New York City space. In latest years, nevertheless, the broader pattern towards on-demand companies and the event of the know-how underpinning these companies has pushed some labs and phlebotomy companies to develop their choices to the final inhabitants.
“With the advent of Uber and DoorDash and all this stuff, patients have really come to expect some sort of on-demand care,” Eller mentioned.
In 2019, Northwell launched a cell app referred to as LabFly that enables customers to schedule residence or office pattern assortment after which view their lab outcomes as soon as they’ve been accomplished. The service prices $20 per go to and is obtainable all through Northwell Health’s service space of New York City, Long Island, and Westchester County.
Northwell developed and launched the system previous to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, however the COVID-19 pandemic drove utilization charges to new heights, Eller mentioned, noting that at its peak, Northwell was gathering round 300 samples per day by way of LabFly, with round 40 % of these collections being for COVID-19 testing. Usage has since tapered off to round 150 sufferers per week.
Startup Getlabs gives a glimpse of how the on-demand economic system Eller cited has impacted the phlebotomy enterprise. The firm, which has inked offers with Laboratory Corporation of America and Quest Diagnostics to supply concierge phlebotomy companies, prices charges of $25 and as much as come to an individual’s residence or office to attract lab samples. (According to the corporate, sufferers can submit receipts to their insurers to attempt to get this assortment price coated.) Patients can ebook appointments and obtain check outcomes on-line, and the agency has developed an API that healthcare organizations can combine into their web sites to permit sufferers and suppliers to schedule collections and obtain outcomes and to deal with assortment of insurance coverage data.
In a transfer extra resembling a tech outfit than a conventional phlebotomy enterprise, the Miami-based firm in February raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Emerson Collective and the Minderoo Foundation. Investors within the spherical additionally included Tusk Venture Partners, Laboratory Corporation of America, Healthworx, Byers Capital, 23andMe cofounder and CEO Anne Wojcicki, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, Capsule founder and CEO Eric Kinariwala, and Alto Pharmacy founder Mattieu Gamache-Asselin.
Getlabs’ higher administration additionally displays the corporate’s roots not within the typical phlebotomy house however somewhat the world of technology-driven on-demand companies. Of the 13 folks listed by the corporate as higher administration, 4 beforehand labored at trip sharing agency Lyft and one beforehand labored at DoorDash.
Getlabs, which didn’t reply to interview requests, started working with Burlington, North Carolina-based Labcorp in April, with the 2 companies partnering on a service referred to as Getlabs for Labcorp, by which sufferers can order residence assortment of samples that can be utilized for Labcorp’s full testing menu. The service is at the moment out there in 51 US markets protecting greater than half of the US inhabitants.
A Labcorp spokesperson mentioned that within the firm’s view the collaboration is “first and foremost… an expansion to meet customers and patients where they are and how they want access to healthcare.”
The spokesperson added that the service “will also support Labcorp’s direct-to-consumer initiatives,” permitting sufferers utilizing the corporate’s Labcorp OnDemand service to schedule residence blood attracts by Getlabs when wanted.
Quest declined to touch upon its relationship with Getlabs.
Opko Health subsidiary BioReference Laboratories, in the meantime, has opted to construct its personal concierge phlebotomy service. The firm launched the service, referred to as Scarlet Health, in January of 2021. BioReference Executive Chairman Jon Cohen mentioned that whereas it has lengthy provided residence phlebotomy, Scarlet Health is a extra streamlined and handy mannequin in comparison with its conventional service. He added that BioReference believes having developed the service in-house supplies it with important benefits when it comes to integration with the lab and affected person and supplier comfort.
“If you look back historically at phlebotomy companies, many of them have failed in the past because they have not been tied to a laboratory,” Cohen mentioned. “It’s not just about drawing somebody’s blood. There is a huge amount of other infrastructure that needs to go along with it. You have to be able to order the test, get the result, get the result back to the physician and into their EMR.”
Like Northwell with Labfly, BioReference started piloting the service earlier than the COVID-19 pandemic however has seen utilization speed up in response to the virus. Sample assortment by way of Scarlet is obtainable all through primarily all the continental US, Cohen mentioned.
BioReference goals transferring ahead to conduct a higher proportion of its pattern assortment by Scarlet, he added. Like Northwell’s Eller, he related demand for the service to the broader pattern in on-demand choices.
“We think it’s better for patients, it’s better for doctors, it’s a better experience overall,” Cohen mentioned. “It’s why Amazon is delivering packages to your house and why Netflix is delivering on-demand service to your home. The whole way the American public has responded to a bunch of different services is, ‘Make it as convenient as possible for me to get this service.'”
BioReference doesn’t cost sufferers for utilizing Scarlet. Cohen mentioned this works out financially as a result of “the [cost] differential between a Scarlet draw and a patient service center visit is not that significant.”
He famous that whereas affected person service facilities are busy at sure factors throughout the day just like the hours earlier than and after work, they’re usually not very busy in the course of the day. Phlebotomists working by the Scarlet service, alternatively, are making a gentle circulation of collections all through the day, which considerably offsets the inefficiency of getting to journey to particular person properties.
Another benefit of residence phlebotomy is that it will increase the share of lab check orders sufferers really fill. Cohen mentioned that sufferers by no means undergo with about 30 % of exams ordered by medical doctors. For sufferers utilizing the Scarlet service that determine is round 10 %, which each boosts BioReference’s requisition quantity and will doubtlessly enhance affected person outcomes.
Northwell’s Eller likewise mentioned that the Labfly service had helped enhance affected person compliance with getting lab work accomplished.
He urged that companies like Labfly will proceed to develop as telemedicine and residential testing advance.
“It opens up opportunities to continue the evolution in telemedicine and for us to perform lab testing in patients’ homes where they can get their results right then and there,” he mentioned. “As technology advances, I think it’s important that we build this infrastructure.”
Northwell is focused on providing the Labfly system to outdoors healthcare programs, as effectively, Eller mentioned, noting that it’s in discussions with some programs about that risk.
“Typically, hospital-based laboratories may or may not be great revenue generators for their systems, so investing in the development of a product like [Labfly] might be a stretch for some smaller health system laboratories,” he mentioned. “But if they can get an out-of-the-box solution that they can just plug in, it could work for them, and that is where we are concentrating a lot of our efforts.”
Cohen mentioned BioReference has been approached by different labs focused on utilizing the Scarlet system and that the corporate is “thinking through that as we speak.”
“We won’t keep it only to BioReference, it looks like, because there is a lot of demand,” he mentioned.