The recent agreement between LabCorp and Walgreens to offer LabCorp patient services in Walgreens stores is not much of a surprise. Patient service centers (PSCs) are essentially blood drawing stations for commercial reference labs like LabCorp from which patient specimens are transported to their massive reference labs (see: Walgreens Partners With LabCorp In New Diagnostic Testing Deal). Walgreens has been anxious to graft some sort of lab testing enterprise on its retail drug stores. Below is an excerpt from the article:
Walgreens Boots Alliance...announced a new collaboration with diagnostic testing firm LabCorp “to develop and operate patient service centers within” certain Walgreens drugstores. The deal is the first for Walgreens since its troubled relationship with Theranos ended last year. Walgreens collaboration with LabCorp will initially begin this summer with five patient service centers in Denver and one in Morrisville, North Carolina. A seventh location in Deerfield, Illinois will open by the end of the year. Financial terms of the partnership weren't disclosed....Walgreens tried to bring diagnostic tests to its stores in Arizona via its Theranos partnership but that deal ended following investigations into the accuracy of Theranos blood tests. Walgreens said the lab testing services with LabCorp will compliment its pharmacy and healthcare clinics as part of an overall mission to provide "greater access to affordable health care service." The centers will be branded "LabCorp at Walgreens" and offer specimen collection services for LabCorp testing, the companies said. The deal also has potential for LabCorp, which is a major competitor to Quest Diagnostics. LabCorp had nearly $9.5 billion in annual revenue last year and diagnostic testing is often under pricing pressure from health insurance companies and government health programs looking to reduce costs. LabCorp already has about 1,750 existing patient services centers and, depending on how the Walgreens partnership grows, could tab into a drugstore chain with more than 8,000 stores.
I believe that this initiative is, at least in part, a prelude to some sort of "point-of-care" testing (POCT) initiative in retail drug stores. It makes no sense to transport test tubes hundreds of miles to perform lab tests when some of the same tests could be performed on-site relatively cheaply. This was in part Walgreens' plan with Theranos that imploded due to Theranos' inability to execute its business plan and which was the subject of controversy and various legal actions (see, for example: Walgreens Scrutinizes Its Theranos Relationship More Closely; Lack of Transparency and Secrecy Has Haunted Theranos from the Beginning; Theranos Directors Uninformed and Quiet During Company Missteps).
There is no question that a partitioned space in Walgreens stores can serve as a blood drawing station but LabCorp will certainly not be ready to give up all of its existing 1,750 patient service centers which are often large and able to accommodate large numbers of patients for phlebotomy services. In my opinion, one of the ultimate goals of this LabCorp-Walgreens partnership may be to test the practicality of point-of-care testing (POCT) in retail drug stores. Such POCT testing, depending on the test menu, often constitutes a large percentage of tests performed on ambulatory care patients. However, one major argument against this idea is that LabCorp and Quest are largely logistics companies with special expertise in collecting specimens at physicians' offices and PSCs and then transporting them to huge, highly automated labs. Company expertise has little to do with decentralized POCT. Let's see how this Walgreens project plays out.
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