Our Company / A European leader

Environment

Fundamentals of the diagnostics market

Diagnostics is the key element of healthcare. Although representing around 12% of all healthcare expenditure, diagnostics activities are the basis of over 70% of all medical decisions leading to proper care of patients. As technology evolves, diagnostics services are therefore a key element of improved efficiency of our healthcare systems.


  • Increasing focus on early detection and prevention of chronic and severe disorders leads to a more intensive use of diagnostic technologies

  • Diagnostic testing and screening services are ordered at approximately 70% of doctor visits

  • Clinicians have rapidly adopted advances in diagnostics (lab testing and imaging) as the most important medical innovations of the last 20 years

  • Demographic trends have lead the growing importance of diagnostics:

  • Increasing aging of the population

  • Growth of patient population with soft diseases (allergies, etc.)

  • Imrovements in disease prevention increases demand on genetic diagnostics

  • Strained financial situation of all European health care systems leads to increasing cost pressures on all players and in particular to fee reductions in technical areas suchs as laboratory medicine and radiology.

  • Private hospitals have already started outsourcing peripherical medical activites (laboratory medicine) and public hospitals will also follow this trend for cost and complexity reasons

  • Public health autorities are increasing quality standarts ans start requiring accreditation for medical service providers.

Segmentation of the diagnostics market

The diagnostics market is composed of :
  • Medical imaging : CT scan, MRI, radiology, mammography, etc.
  • Lab testing: clinical chemistry, hematology, immunology, microbiology, genetic testing, etc.
  • Clinical pathology: cytogenetics, sample tissue analysis, pap test, etc.
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Labco’s current core activity is focusing on laboratory medicine.

Our clinical laboratories provide physicians and patients with a catalogue of over 2.500 tests in clinical chemistry, hematology, immunology, microbiology, parasitology, pathology, serology, toxicology, virology, genetic testing and more specific fields.

The European clinical laboratory market

The clinical laboratory market represents c. 31% of the diagnostics market in Europe, where diagnosis procedures are increasingly calling on laboratory medicine analysis. On the whole, laboratory medicine expenditure accounts for about 4% of healthcare expenditure, which means a European clinical laboratory volume of c. M€ 26, of which the private sector approximately accounts for 35%.

The diversity of health services in Europe means that laboratory medicine services are organised according to very different systems from one country to another.
clinical_lab-market_EU