Point-of-care testing:  A critical analysis of the market and future trends

Brief Description, Method, and Processes

To analyze our target which was the point-of-care industry, we conducted detailed research on POC products as well as the industry. Our research involved both the analysis of the financial state of the POC industry as well as an in-depth study of the current POC products. We studied the most demanded POC products as well as read published journals to obtain information about the products. We further dived into survey’s conducted by POC researchers; the studies gave us knowledge about which features in POC devices were in high demand. Our main target was to write a research paper on the topic; what was unique about our paper was the fact that it was both a technological as well as a financial analysis of the industry which had never been done before. There has been research conducted on the technology itself, or the industry itself alone, but we had not found any previous papers where the two aspects were brought together, and the ideas used conjointly to give ideal solutions to the problems in this promising industry. I will be attaching the abstract/conclusion paragraph from the research paper I wrote to give an idea of how our research panned out and what were some of our findings.

Point-of-care Industry (POC) is a very promising industry with innumerable areas for future advancements. Point-of-care refers to disease testing at the site of the patients’ abode- for example- the Covid-19 RAT test kit, or the blood-glucose measurement machine we use at home are all POC devices. We studied the trends in the POC market value for the past years as well as investigated the estimates for the future. POC devices are very advantageous in that they are portable, lightweight, don’t require a very special storage method or similar, and their tests are more often simple, few step processes. One of the issues is the case of false positives and false negatives which reduces their demand against their competing laboratory testing alternatives. For the POC devices to become increasing useful, focus should be put on the sensitivity, specificity, cost of devices, and the time required to receive results for the tests. It was further discovered that work on these areas for a particular POC device should only be conducted if the steps proved to be financially feasible. From the financial analysis of POC industry, we found a positively increasing trend which is very beneficial for the industry. The industry is expected to grow exponentially in the future years, and we attempted to suggest some of the areas which hold the potential to forklift the growth and allow the industry to progress and grow in its current trajectory. The industry can focus on collaborating with smart POC technologies and collaborate with the smart technology industry to expand revenue; and it can also move into producing more sensitive and accurate POC devices for non-communicable diseases; enhancements to POCTs for use in diseases where continuous monitoring of patient’s medical state is required (and the conventional clinical testing is cumbersome) is another field of expansion. The industry can improve its POC devices that have been deployed in these areas and if they meet clinical standards, this will revolutionize both medical diagnosis in general, as well as help save countless lives.

Difficulties encountered and how they were resolved

 The biggest problem was collecting enough statistically accurate data regarding the financial state of the point-of-care industry. There are several sources who produce annual valuation of the industry, and several sources tend to have different values from each other which made it difficult for us to establish statistically accurate evidence. To work around the problem, we collected net valuation per annum from the most trustworthy sources, and we also collected annual net valuation for some years from several sources wherever it was possible and used only those statistics that was in close or near-close agreement with each other to establish our arguments and statements. Furthermore, we were unable to find a research paper that analyzed the industry from both a financial and technological standpoint conjointly which meant most of our deductions were made based on our own research grounds which is why we suggested in the paper for further research through different parts of our paper.

Improvements and suggestions for project repetition and future study

We have suggested several different improvements throughout the research paper we wrote. Amongst them, the most important would-be aspects such as performing an even more in-depth financial analysis. It should be mentioned that several of well-known financial journals and reports require membership access or paid subscriptions which we were unable to obtain, hence unable to assess their data. This data could be vital in a better understanding of the research topic. Furthermore, we had found several data sources and research papers from famous researchers which contained valuable data and tabular data they had obtained from real-time research. Due to the lack of time, we were unable to obtain permission from those researchers to use their tabular data in our research. If the project was reported, we would try to perform it over a longer period and obtain access to these data to include in our papers. Furthermore, in our paper, we suggested the use of new age biosensing and several other improvements that can be made to the POC devices. We would like to research further on these technologies and also get the opportunity to have hands-on research experience with these to get a deeper insight into their functionality and capabilities.

Impacts of the research beyond the classroom

The research work we conducted has a very big impact on the medical and diagnostics industry. Point-of-care disease testing is one of the most important technologies for diseases testing as it promises to be fast, cheap and has potential to replace laboratory-based testing system. In many rural areas, disease diagnostics is very arduous as there are no laboratory-testing facilities for people to get diagnosed. The simplest of disease testing require people to travel to the main cities to gain access to testing facilities. With POC technology, they can simply perform tests at their homes, hence saving the costs associated with travel and laboratory testing. Furthermore, if POC devices can be made highly accurate, that will also eliminate the need for laboratory testing much more which will be advantageous for both hospitals and for individual people. Hospitals can then allocate more manpower for disease treatment; hospitals can also use the POCs in intensive-care patients to continuously monitor their health and to make quick decisions during emergencies. This goes onto show the potential of this technology which prompted us to conduct this research.

Link to research paper-

POC Microfluidics Paper_HUSSAIN Wasif Latif.pdf

Powerpoint Presentation-

Presentation_HUSSAIN Wasif Latif.pdf