Diagnostics labs find new growth vectors as health awareness rises

As a school student, I was often entrusted with the task of checking on my grandfather’s urine samples for sugar levels. The prevailing method then was Benedict's solution. You take some solution in a test tube, heat it in boiling water, or, as in my case, a simple wax lamp, add a few drops of urine, and watch the colour change. If it stays blue, that is good news, no sugar present.

  Green means trace amounts present. Yellow would indicate a moderate amount. Orange and red are danger indicators. My grandfather’s insulin dose was titrated, based on the bi-weekly Benedict’s solution-powered test.

 

Today, we can check sugar levels with a simple pin prick, one drop of blood. And the measurement device tells you the exact value of glucose in your blood when the test was taken. One can also use the CGM, which continuously monitors glucose levels. 

Many of us got acquainted with other tests like oxygenation levels, using the small device clipped to fingers, during the Covid pandemic. 

Smart watches, like Apple, measure your heartbeat, alert you to an irregular rhythm, and can also do an ECG or measure your sleep or blood oxygen levels.

 

With all these devices finding their way to homes, one would have imagined that the traditional mode of taking samples to a diagnostic lab would be waning. However, if reports are to be believed, the sector is booming. Reports estimate the size of the diagnostic labs industry to be in the region of $11-12 billion, and growing robustly. If you add the sales of diagnostic kits, the size could easily be thrice as large. How are they growing? 

The headline, ‘Genomic tests get cheaper, expand beyond metros’ (Business Standard October 6, 2025) caught my attention. The top-end diagnostic labs are today offering non-invasive tests to determine cancer risk, and charging a tidy sum for each test. Some estimates put the total market at $500 million. That is around 5 per cent of the total size of the market.

 

Indian consumers, at least those belonging to the upper-middle- or middle-income class have always been wary of visiting a diagnostic lab. That changed during the Covid pandemic. Many of us had to go to diagnostic labs, multiple times, to get ourselves tested. While Covid was dreaded, the fear associated with a visit to the diagnostic lab seems to have reduced. 

Corporate hospitals see their diagnostic lab business, especially the attractively priced ‘annual medical checkup’, as a great way of expanding their catchment area. Often, the person who comes for his or her annual checkup becomes a potential long-term patient of the hospital. It is said that most hospitals have a way of monitoring the flow of customers to their diagnostic labs.

Then, there are the standalone labs. Some of them are large companies whose shares are traded on the stock exchange. They are all being run by professionals who apply the traditional rules of growing a business. You expand your catchment area, add new labs in new locations, or you offer greater value-added services in your labs. At one time, a diagnostic lab largely did stool, urine and blood tests. Not any more. In the bigger cities, they offer a multitude of tests, including stress treadmill tests, CAT scans, 2D Echo, and more. 

Genomic tests are yet another addition to their high-value test portfolio. 

How does a consumer navigate this landscape? Many of them depend on their doctors to advise them on what tests to spend on. Better doctors allow the patients to go to the lab of their choice (while cautioning them about the labs to avoid). The more knowledgeable consumer is able to navigate this using their friend circles. While doing a project for a diagnostic lab chain a few years ago, our team of consultants decided to scrape online reviews to build a profile of the top five lab chains. What we discovered was indeed interesting. There were thousands of customer reviews for some of the labs. Many of these reviews were location-specific (the receptionist was rude; the lab was dirty etc.). What also caught our attention was that one of the labs had a disproportionate number of reviews, indicating that they were gaming the system. 

Health enthusiasts today have access to several tools to monitor their health. And these diagnostic labs offer them the ability to track data related to various parameters, such as blood glucose, to help them balance the nutritional intake, exercise, and sleep regime. Today, diagnostic labs also offer health enthusiasts charts to monitor their health across multiple parameters over the years.   

As Indian consumers become more health-aware, more affluent, they will seek out better types of diagnostic tests. Most affluent families are veering towards healthier lives — or prevention rather than cure. And towards this end, diagnostic labs are performing a great service. The days of Benedict's solution are long gone. Today's consumer is armed with multiple health test equipment. And anyway, there is a lab not too far, at least in the bigger cities of India.

 

The writer is the author of 12 books and founder of Brand-Building.com; he can be reached at ambimgp@brand-building.com