As COVID-19 spreads across the US, the digital health community has stepped up to solve urgent clinical needs, from providing free telemedicine visits to delivering in-home test kits.
Early on in the crisis, our team at Health Gorilla realized we had a significant role to play — 1,200 community providers and digital health organizations rely on us to place lab orders electronically and receive structured test results. We act as the API layer between 100 different labs and digital health developers, like Virta, DrChrono, and K health, whose provider users need the ability to monitor patient lab values. The vast majority of physicians who transact on our APIs are community-based providers, many of whom operate independent practices and are serving rural and suburban communities.
We moved quickly to launch COVID-19 test ordering and resulting in our system, starting with LabCorp on March 9th. The next day, we launched with Quest, and the day after that, BioReference went live. Together, these 3 labs make up a majority of the diagnostic testing market. Many other regional labs are now taking orders from us as well.
Now that physicians are getting results back through our system, we felt it was important to share some preliminary findings.
Over the past 2 weeks, Health Gorilla has processed 193 COVID-19 test results. The test could not be performed for 10 tests (5.2%). Of the 183 tests that could be performed, 8 tests (4.4%) were positive for COVID-19. The virus was not detected in 175 tests (95.6%).
Cumulative test volume is increasing exponentially among our provider base, as charted below.
We also were able to gather some data on test turnaround time, measuring the time from when the order was placed to when results were received. For LabCorp, it took roughly 98 hours on average to get results back. For BioReference, it took 46 hours on average. When looking across all the labs we transact with for COVID-19 tests, it took about 72 hours on average from order to result.
While the sample size is too small for making definitive conclusions, there are some key trends worth tracking.
These are challenging times for almost every industry stakeholder. We are playing our part by helping providers place COVID-19 test orders without the administrative obstacles and getting them fast access to their patients’ test results. We stand in strong support of the medical providers serving patients on the front-lines of fighting this deadly virus. We’ve made lab ordering free for any provider looking to place COVID-19 test orders for their patients. Please get in touch with our team by submitting a message on our website, and we will get you up and running as fast as possible. We will be providing additional updates as more data comes in.
—
To learn more about COVID-19 test ordering in Health Gorilla, see our press release. To get in touch, submit a message at healthgorilla.com.