How IVD industry will pan out over the coming years?

With the world’s largest young population on the one hand and an increasing life expectancy on the other, the diagnostic space in India is going through a significant transformation. Improved patient awareness, accessibility of healthcare services, increasing lifestyle disorders, and changing attitudes toward preventive healthcare have revolutionized the growth of the in-vitro diagnostics (IVD) sector in India.

The IVD market in India is segmented by several factors – test type (clinical chemistry, immunodiagnostics, hematology, serology, microbiology, molecular diagnostics, and others), product (instruments, reagents, and other consumables), specialty (diabetes, oncology, cardiology, infectious disease, autoimmune disease, etc.), number of use (disposable or reusable IVD devices), and the type of end-user (diagnostic laboratories, hospitals, and clinics). The need for and importance of point-of-care testing is also being increasingly realized. The Indian IVD market was estimated at USD 1.24 billion in 2019, and India is expected to register an annual growth of 7.5 percent to reach USD 2.06 billion by 2027.

There has been a paradigm shift in the IVD sector in India in recent years. The emergence of infectious diseases has emphasized the need for molecular diagnostics results to be available easily. RT-PCR and other molecular tests, so long restricted to referral laboratories, have become more decentralized. This has increased the demand for IVD equipment in smaller setups for tests like Covid-19, respiratory panels, and tuberculosis. The National Health Mission is proposing the establishment of more hospitals and laboratories, which would fuel the growth of IVD further in smaller towns of India. With a lot of emphasis on faster turnaround time for initiation of early treatment, the demand for devices and reagents for both routine and specialized testing from more minor satellite laboratories will see a rise in the days ahead. The government’s focus on Make in India has encouraged the development of indigenous IVD products, which are affordable, yet of optimum quality, and will become global in the coming years. They are already experiencing increasing acceptance amongst Indian laboratories. The medical devices market in India is growing at a staggering pace, and India is poised to become a global manufacturing hub in the medical devices space. Global IVD companies are also expanding their operational footprint in India.

India is the fourth-largest Asian medical devices market after Japan, China, and South Korea and one of the top twenty medical devices markets worldwide.

Between 2020 and 2030, the diagnostic imaging market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 16.4 percent.

Laboratory automation has been the buzzword in the diagnostic space for some time. IVD is directed toward total lab automation as the future across disciplines today, as more diagnostic laboratories are adopting it to reduce errors, increase throughput, reduce manual intervention, and be future-ready.

Diagnostic testing is now taking a more customized approach. Laboratories are looking for solutions to enable them to manage the end-to-end clinical journey. The IVD industry is also responding to that need and adopting digitization at every step through middleware and artificial intelligence (AI) support.

Redcliffe Labs is driven by the objective of making diagnostics accessible and affordable in the farthest corner of India, providing superior patient experience and utmost clinician satisfaction. With our presence now in Tier-III, IV, and V cities of India, we aim to bring state-of-the-art IVD to smaller towns to provide objective, evidence-based laboratory results to all patients. With this aim, we have partnered with leading IVD providers, like Roche, Abbott, Horiba, Transasia, BD, Bio Rad, Trivitron, and Snibe to install equipment of varying throughputs across our laboratory network. We have also introduced AI in our routine diagnostic practice by using AI-assisted tools for digital pathology and personalized patient reports.

With high-end indigenous and global automated IVD solutions readily available, the coming decade will see specialized testing move beyond cities and closer to patients in remote areas. This will ensure a faster turnaround time, facilitate early screening and diagnosis while also driving ease and patient compliance to testing.