Independent Medical Laboratories in China: A Sunrise Industry under the Circumstances of Healthcare Reformation

摘要

With the rapid development of clinical medicine, the demand on laboratory testing has increased, new technologies and equipments supplied to generate a large number of new tests to meet the clinical demands. However, it is getting difficult to establish laboratories able to perform all the tests individually because of the technological, financial, and personnel limitations, which is the case even for some large-scale hospitals. It is easy to understand that the high-tech and throughput might also mean high cost and operation/management skills thus making it difficult or uneconomical for a single hospital to conduct all the tests needed. The allure of third-party medical laboratory appears and operates with the characteristics of resource sharing and intensive managing. The third-party medical laboratory is a medical institution licensed by a government agency responsible for healthcare affairs, as an independent legal personality, and specializes in medical laboratory testing services. The third-party medical laboratory tests samples from patients from different hospitals and delivers the results to clients by establishing a cooperative relationship with the hospitals. The third-party medical laboratory is independent of hospitals and undertakesthe legal responsibility independently, therefore it is also referred to as an Independent Medical Laboratory (IML) in China.