The global blood testing market is set to be worth $128.45 billion (£103bn) by 2028. The UK is well placed to take a significant share of that; and leading the charge is Superdrug.
Working with Thriva Solutions’ diagnostic and health platform, customers will now have easy access to an extensive range of health tests. From ‘everyday’ indicators such as cholesterol, triglycerides and globulin levels to antibody tests for chickenpox, Hepatitis B, and MMR. And, with the range of tests it now offers, Superdrug will have a new revenue stream.
Not so long ago, this would have been impossible. Individual testing and diagnostics—or ‘Diagnostics-as-a-Service’—simply couldn’t be done at the scale that makes business sense for retail pharmacies. There was a good reason for that; it’s hard to do. In fact, it's very hard.
Start to unpick a diagnostics platform operation, and the complexity is soon clear. There are testing kits to manufacture and assemble; patients to register and take payments from; and qualified labs you can trust to analyse samples. You need a logistics partner that can safely track and transport samples; IT experts that can integrate the various software systems; and regulatory and clinical professionals who can ensure the integrity of everything that happens. And you need to do this day in, day out, at a huge scale.
This is not Superdrug's core business. Their expertise is in pharmacy and retail. Building a diagnostics service from scratch, which matches the exceptional standards of customer service they are used to offering, would be time-consuming and costly. Get any part of it wrong, and it also represents a brand and customer satisfaction risk.
But it is what we do. Over 7 years of managing large-scale, multi-channel testing programmes, we have fine-tuned an end-to-end diagnostics platform service that is simple to enable, scalable at will, and with world-class capabilities at every stage. Remember Covid and that ‘r’ rate…it was Thriva Solutions’ tests that gave the government its data. More than 4m at-home tests later, we know how to deliver a large-scale, trusted and cost-efficient remote diagnostics service.
That is what Superdrug is investing in—a proven service it can trust. Why would it take on the burden of doing something it has never done before, with all the risks and resources that entails, when Thriva Solutions already has everything it needs. It can launch diagnostics services in a fraction of the time and cost it would take to go it alone, opening up a brand new revenue stream.