CLN Daily 2025
Being able to test patients wherever they are can shave hours, if not days, off the time from test to diagnosis. Such point-of-care testing (POCT) is particularly helpful for people who can’t easily access medical care. In addition, it is often less expensive than in-clinic testing. For example, diabetes test strips, one of the most common POCT tests in use, cost under a dollar per strip.
Moreover, as the pandemic highlighted, POCT has become a powerful tool for diagnosing infectious diseases. While the ubiquity of COVID-19 tests significantly accelerated technological advancements in POCT, several key challenges remain, according to Isabell Trinh, MSc, a science communications specialist at Nostics. Trinh will lead a roundtable session at ADLM 2025 (formerly the AACC Annual Scientific Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo) on how to overcome barriers to adopting POCT for infectious diseases.
As she explains, getting these tests into practice is not as easy as it might seem. Trinh has seen the same issues crop up over and over, including with the decentralized nature of the tests and with reimbursement, which presents different challenges in different countries. In the U.S., for example, if a test is not applicable to an existing reimbursement code, a new code would need to be created. In Germany, “GPs can only apply for reimbursement once the test is in [an insurer’s] lineup, and only if their patient is with that insurance company,” Trinh said.
Uptake can also be a challenge. “How do we actually access all of the individual practices that are led by doctors everywhere?” she asked. “How do you contact them and how do you convince them to actually believe that your test is the best test?” That can be especially difficult if a clinician is accustomed to practicing in a certain way and doesn’t appreciate the value of a test that could reduce return visits “if the diagnosis isn’t right the first time,” Trinh said.
At the session, she will lead a workshop about how to expand the use of POCT and reduce the challenges faced by everyone from general practitioners to diagnostics company professionals to clinical care coordinators. She hopes the discussion will engage “different people who have an interest in new diagnostic technologies but not necessarily the same point of view,” she said.
She will also present a systems map to help attendees visualize a complex problem and identify potential intervention points.
“We want to identify where we can intervene and where we can make POCT more attractive,” she said.
If such interventions can be found — and hurdles to adopting POCT can be overcome — the rewards can be multifold for both practitioners and patients. The work is moving towards “developing a rapid diagnostic platform that can very quickly identify pathogens, and, instead of a couple of days as right now, it takes under 10 minutes. That’s the goal,” she said, with tests being widely available in doctors’ offices and clinics.
“That’s something that’s going to be really important in the future as the population ages and we have more elderly people,” she said. In addition, POCT could help people in remote settings decide whether they need to travel for follow-up care.
Jen A. Miller is a freelance journalist who lives in Audubon, New Jersey. +Bluesky: @byjenamiller.bsky.social