Diagnostics enters its ‘coming of age’ moment with patients at the center

For many Americans, the first widespread exposure to innovation in medical diagnostics came during the COVID-19 pandemic, when at-home test kits were widely used as a routine part of daily life. While these types of at-home diagnostic tests existed for years, COVID-19 marked the first time millions of people regularly used clinically validated tools, similar to those used in health care settings, to detect an active infectious disease.

A recent event hosted by Arizona State University’s College of Health Solutions and the Personalized Medicine Coalition at the Barrett & O’Connor Center in Washington, D.C., featured conversations between leaders in the diagnostics industry — across academia, government and industry — discussing the most pressing issues affecting medical diagnostics today and what they foresee as the issues that will dominate the industry in the years ahead.

The panelists discussed emerging tools, such as health care-focused apps that allow patients to more easily access their medical records, that are already beginning to operationalize a trend toward patient-centric diagnostics.

But that autonomy doesn’t come without risk, especially when diagnostic test results can be delivered without proper context. Panelists emphasized the importance of health care providers helping to ensure that patients receive accurate, actionable and appropriately contextualized information. 

For T. Scott Isbell, a professor of pathology at the St. Louis University School of Medicine, artificial intelligence might play a role in helping to translate results from a laboratory to a patient.

“You get a laboratory test done, and pretty quickly you get a little ding on your phone, and you get the result,” Isbell said. “That’s an interesting space where we should be thinking about how to use AI to help with interpretation, because right now it’s going directly from my lab report straight to an app, so the language is not really meant for public digestion. I think that’s where we have an opportunity to (use AI) to refine that language.”

For Dawn Mattoon, chief executive officer at Mercy BioAnalytics, the diagnostics industry — particularly cancer screening — is having a “coming of age” moment.

Mattoon and her team at Mercy BioAnalytics have developed a new blood-based test that can detect different cancers. These new blood cancer screening tests developed by Mercy BioAnalytics and other medical diagnostic companies can detect signs of cancer earlier when treatment is more effective and less invasive and has the potential to improve survival rates.

Yet even as diagnostics has its “coming of age” moment, Mattoon emphasized that it is important to understand its limitations.

“We're now more aware than I think we've been in the past about the limitations of the technology and the limitations of the kind of claims that we can make based on these tests,” Mattoon said. “The more aware we are of those limitations allows us to take the next leaps forward, and that's the sort of the optimistic part of what I see happening right now.”

Dr. Tomasz Beer, vice president and chief medical officer for multi-cancer early detection at Abbott Cancer Diagnostics, echoed Mattoon in saying that the adoption of early detection cancer screening tests will likely improve public health and outcomes for patients, but that for these tests — and other new, promising technology in the medical diagnostics field — it is vital for companies to be transparent about what information they provide and how patients can make decisions based on that information.

“I think there's a real risk of public confusion nowadays,” Beer said. “There's so much dialogue in the press about these tests, ranging from promised land to disaster and everything in between, and I think there's a real need for clear, consistent information for the public to absorb these tests.”

In this new era of diagnostics, innovation alone is not enough. Clarity in information for patients may be just as lifesaving as the test itself.