Circa 2030: Home Testing Experts Predict

Home testing industry experts spanning the lab, device and provider space convened to discuss where we are in terms of testing at home today. They also laid bare the challenges to expansion and made predictions of where the industry will be in 2030. If you missed this webcast from ATA's Home Testing trends discussion during Telehealth Awareness Week, it's not too late to dive in and watch the free, on-demand replay. Home Testing Use Cases Trends Session

If you missed the live session, you can use the 'work from home' trick of watching the replay at 1.5x speed. Or, read this imperfect summary of the themes and predictions made by the experts.

Home Testing Has...

Mainstreamed:?Mainstream, especially for wellness, preventative.?Growing uses for rural access, privacy testing and even test-to-treat.?The pancemic driven testing drove an awareness explosion.?Consumerization of home testing has happened, and is now a section of the pharmacy

Only just begun:?Tests have and will continue to move from the acute to ambulatory and into the home. Lots of tests that can be done at home are being done in labs and are paid for already with existing codes.?Home testing is “just” changing the site of care where, of course, the equivalency of the results to ‘doctor quality’ lab tests is the concern.?

Telehealth Opportunity:??Diagnostics drive 70-80% medical decision making, but, telehealth encounters have generally not had access to visit-relevant tests.

Proving proctoring:?Proctoring has been shown to give assurance of the sample/test correctness, and ensured accuracy of reading the result. It has also helped ensure accuracy of patient ID confirmation.

Strengthened Physician/Patient relationship: The #1 recommender of a televisits today, instead of an office visit, is the patient’s doctor.?The same should be true for home tests as well. Where someone has a primary physician, the sustained role of the primary care physician is rooted in the fact that a) they know you, b) they have all your history/context to provide the diagnoses that are needed to access treatment and c) they help you navigate the incredibly complex healthcare system.?The more that home tests are connected into that relationship, the more adoption will grow.?

Overutilization concerns to watch:?The disconnectedness of transactional testing can result in overutilization.?If there’s no connection between a medical test result and the person’s healthcare team, re-testing can be expected to be prevalent.

Predictions for 2030 Home Testing

Test to treat:?For diagnoses that have a time sensitive treatment, Test-to-treat will be standard of care.

Augmented with AI: Realitime, comprehensive clinicial decision support live in the telehealth engagement will be the norm.

Wellness-to-DX Continuity of care: Home test results are integrated into the continuity of care and the full context of the patient’s history and diagnoses.

One to Many Scale: Size of the effectively served population of an individual physician will dramatically expand as technology enabled connected and test-informed service delivery becomes the norm. ??

Reimbursed:?Enough data/history will have been observed to enable new codes and modifiers to be well established for prescribed tests performed at home as ‘just another site’ and because Telehealth IS Healthcare.

ID confirmation: Biometrics enhancement to test collection will add another layer of ID confirmation, and will integrate with the patient’s digital/private and identity confirmed medical records at their provider

Sample methods:?Expanded comfort and mainstreaming of finger prick blood samples, along with saliva, swab, urine and stool.?And, technology advances in sample prep steps at home such as mobile centrifugation.

Barriers to Bust

What are some of the key barriers to pervasive home testing change that need focus to move toward the 2030 predictions??

Policy, reimbursement, workflow integration

• Policy: practice liability, licensure and regulatory pathways for new tests
• Reimbursement: data to support sustainability
• Workflow :?Integrate workflows and expand ‘warm’ handoffs between players in the system.?Parallel/different processes/workflow completely divorced from your doctors’ process slows adoption

Brandon Johnson , Michael Mina, MD, PhD , Heather Lucore , 郭静仁 , Chris O'Dell , American Telemedicine Association , David P. Ryan

See the full webcast and fireside chat replay here:

Home Testing Replay