Last week I presented a poster on virtual lab testing at the 46th annual Drug Information Association meeting in Washington DC, with over 7,000 attendees present.

The most impressive session I attended was entitled “Implications of Comparative Effectiveness Research for Health Care Innovation”, with leaders like Mark McClellan, David Snow, Arthur Caplan, Jack Lewin, Murray Kopelow, and Eric Campbell discussing how the healthcare system will evolve to provide more consistently high quality care to more people, using no more financing than at present. In a nutshell, I left with the message that personalized medicine, whereby each of us receives the treatments that work best for us individually, becomes more widespread thru better coordination of care — a somewhat tall order, huh?

My poster session had a humbler aim, to describe how, provided through a virtual channel, costs of this approach are much lower than traditional channels. In high volume, low counseling tests like lipid panels, our costs were just 17% of going to a doctor in person, and even in low volume, high counseling tests like sexually transmitted diseases, our costs were ~80% of the “live” model. -DS

View or download the full poster/abstract here: DIA-Medivo-poster