The point of care testing mentioned in the article is by no means a new idea. I have practiced as a general practitioner since 1967, and up to the 1990s I used to conduct comprehensive absorption photometry (wet chemistry) and dry chemistry (analysis with carrier-bound reagents) in my own practice laboratory. This enabled me to tell patients their blood counts in next to no time and initiate treatment accordingly. Today, a patient visiting their doctor on a Friday will have to wait until the following Monday.
The extremely low reimbursement paid for laboratory services by the statutory sickness funds, combined with the high costs of reagents and test strips (which exceeded the reimbursement amount by multiples) and the disproportionately large package sizes (which were only partly used up by the use-by date) on the part of the delivering pharmaceutical companies and the expensive costs of purchasing a suitable photometer (which did not pay for itself) prompted me to give up my own practice laboratory. It had become a financial burden that I could not justify any more, an unprofitable hobby.
If the thinking is about to change then the mentioned negative measures would need to be cancelled out and corrected. In the interest of patients, a renaissance of previous diagnostic options would be welcome and desirable, even if it is probably not really to be expected.
References
- 1.Junker R, Schlebusch H, Luppa PB. Point-of-care testing in hospitals and primary care. Dtsch Arztebl Int. 2010;107(33):561–567. doi: 10.3238/arztebl.2010.0561. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]