Diagnostics at Home

Diagnostic and monitoring device is one of the biggest product segments of global home healthcare market with highest share. Home diagnostics is gaining recognition as gadgets drives down the cost and provides a reliable degree of accuracy. With increasing health awareness among people, increase in number of young and geriatric people diagnosed with chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiac disorders and respiratory diseases,the demand for home diagnostics is expected to grow even more in the next few years. 

People buy their at-home diagnostic tests and health-monitoring devices at pharmacies or online. At home diagnostic products include blood pressure monitors; blood c holesterollevel monitors; heart-rate monitors; blood glucose monitors, A 1 C test kits, and monitoring supplies (including lancets and test strips); home pregnancy and ovulation tests; and kits that require a blood or other tissue sample to be sent out for testing, such as test kits for blood cholesterol levels, HIV, hepatitis C, and DNA tests that can be used to prove paternity. The latest to be added in this category is at-home cancer testing device for screening lung, breast and prostate cancer. Some of the key industry participants in global home diagnostic market includes 3M Health Care, Bayer AG, Abbott Laboratories, Phillips Healthcare, Cardinal Health, Inc., GE Healthcare, Gentiva Health Services, Inc., Johnson & Johnson Services, Inc., F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd., Medtronic, Inc., Omron 

Healthcare, Inc. and Invacare Corporation among others. 

Currently the largest market for home tests is blood glucose monitoring (BGM). When tracing the history of home testing it can be seen that some of the technology developments, from initial urine dipsticks to finger-stick testing, are where smaller and smaller amounts of sample are now required. Most home diagnostic systems provide a single test result; but in future a panel of tests might be more applicable and that the output of these results would need to be displayed in an easy to understand manner for the home user.

Alongside the technology improvements, more recently greater focus is seen on providing better data for the patient to manage their disease. Devices that now provide the calculation of bolus amounts of insulin that the patient should take based on their carbohydrate intake and blood glucose are becoming available. Easier analysis of the results of testing and sharing of that data have become more commonplace. 

Corporate Wellness programs

Every company should provide employees with resources to pursue a healthy lifestyle. With corporate working longer hours and dealing with greater levels of stress than ever before, it only makes perfect sense fora company to provide wellness strategies so as to retain their best people and ensure they are continually playing at the top of their game. Corporate wellness programs could be the key ingredient for unlocking a company's earning potential, productivity and morale. They can also help businesses reduce their health care costs by creating a healthier and happier workforce.

A wellness system model with purposeful engagement should be a part of every company. It should not only take care of physical wellness but also spiritual, social, emotional, occupational, intellectual, environmental and financial aspects as well. Before starting off, it is required to set the vision, goals and measurable objectives. Employer should gather health data to get a snapshot of the current state of company's health. Then it is to decide which programs make the most sense to the employees. Key programs could include weight management, smoking cessations, financial wellness, depression management, physical activity etc.

Sustaining high participation in these programs is difficult. It requires aggressive branding and communication strategies in order to promote awareness and help drive participation. Survey and design an incentive program to help encourage participation. Forming a wellness and social media committee can help as well. But most importantly, make it fun- monitor the effectiveness and make adjustments as needed. Employees should also take responsibility of personal wellness.

About 500b employers offer a corporate wellness program. Rest are generally unaware of the benefits of investing in wellness. Accessible and affordable sources of support and advice are rarely available for small and medium enterprises. The current landscape for workplace wellness programs is plagued by interdependent challenges for employers and to address these, there is a need fora clear and coherent strategic approach, effective measurement, adequate resourcing and comprehensive wellness solutions.

The question now is, will we seize the opportunity to optimize the benefits of workplace wellness programs?

Molecular Testing

The market is increasing for point-of-care testing with the growth of boundary -less hospitals and community care and the need for rapid results outside of the clinical setting. Point-of-care testing serves a pivotal function for delivering precision medicine that will both improve quality and affordability of care at a time when outcomes-based medicine is the new model for healthcare. Point-of-care molecular testing is also a rapidly expanding market. A variety of technologies are being developed for DNA detection and amplification, mostly aiming to detect pathogens. The challenges associated with developing POC molecular tests include the additional steps for sample pre treatment (e.g., cell sorting, isolation, and lysis) and the requirements for nucleic acid extraction and signal amplification, and sample-prep integration with a complete analytical process that does not require skilled operator involvement, and the need for fast results. In particular, true portability remains a moving target, as most current devices tend to be at least shoe box sized, may depend on external power sources drive thermal cycling for conventional PCR.

Now that device manufacturers have found a way to fit PCR and other nucleic acid amplification techniques into easy-to-use, counter-top instruments, a dozen or more companies likely will rush to develop new products. The first comm¬ercial version of a real-time nucleic acid detection system was Cepheid's Gene¬Xpert system, designed to purify, concentrate, detect, and identify targeted nucleic acid sequences delivering diagnoses from unprocessed samples in approximately 30 minutes. The ability of this relatively small bench-top device

to perform real-time quantitative PCR in approximately 90 minutes with minimal operator interaction offers the potential to perform rapid molecular testing in situations where the need for results is urgent.

While such devices are in development, small, benchtop systems that perform genomic analyses continue to reach the market with an increasing variety of tests that now include infectious diseases, drug responses to drugs used to treat heart disease, pharmacogenetics, hereditary genetics, and recently, cancer. Respiratory infections are likely to be among the leading applications for POC molecular diagnostics through 2020. In addition, POC molecular tests are poised to be used widely in developing countries, both for diagnosing emerging infectious diseases and for more familiar infections.

While the sensitivity and specificity of molecular diagnostics are extremely high, there is a danger of contamination and mistakes in the pre-analytical phase and in interpretation, as with any other POC test. However, investigators and clinicians anticipate that given market forces and current demand in specific markets, most notably infectious diseases, portable, hand-held, inexpensive POC devices, equivalent to currently offered full-size molecular analytical systems, will become available. These devices will aid in the detection of mutations or in the identification of infectious agents, as well as aid in the management of patient care.