Online Diagnostics News : Frontine : The hindu : The diagnostic rip-off

While the health care industry has welcomed the corporatisation of diagnostic laboratories, serious questions persist on the quality of service many of these small as well as big players offer and the rates they charge.

PATHOLOGICAL tests were in recent decades virtually the preserve of corner-store pathologists. Today they are big business, with more than 25,000 clinical laboratories carrying out around 11 lakh tests daily. These range from routine examinations of blood sugar and cholesterol levels to complicated hormonal assays and immunological investigations. A number of pharmaceutical majors, home-grown laboratory chains and foreign players have set up shop around the country in the last five years for a slice of the Indian pathological pie.

Corporate entities such as Raptakos Brett, Speciality Ranbaxy Laboratories (SRL), Nicholas Piramal, Pathnet (a collaboration between Dr. Reddy's Laboratories and the Australian Gribbles Group) are in competition with laboratories like Elbit, Medinova, Ehrlich, Anands, Dr. Lal's, Thyrocare and Metropolis.

The growth in the number of the middle classes, coupled with the demand for affordable health insurance for an ageing population, is expected to translate into an exponential growth for diagnostic laboratories. According to doctors and others from the health care industry, the corporatisation of diagnostic laboratories with the entry of players operating nationally will not only help standardise the hitherto unorganised sector but also give a fillip to the health insurance sector.

But, for obvious business reasons, most players have so far restricted themselves to urban areas, and that too certain regions. For example, Elbit and Medinova are well-known in the South (mainly Bangalore and Hyderabad), Dr. Lal's and Pathnet in the North (in the Delhi region), and SRL in the Western region. While semi-urban areas are served through a network of collection centres, which draw the test samples and send them to the city-based laboratories for diagnosis, rural regions are still uncovered.

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