Imagine being a cancer patient and receiving your life-saving treatments from the safety, comfort and convenience of your own home. Imagine having your diagnostic tests done in your local pharmacy with a simple finger prick rather than having a vial of blood drawn at your doctor’s office or laboratory. Imagine being checked for flu, strep or COVID-19 without having to wait in a doctor’s office or urgent care, saving you time, steps and money.

More and more, you don’t have to imagine these scenarios — with advances in medical technology driving transformative changes in healthcare delivery, they are becoming reality. And this shift of making vital care and preventative screenings closer to and more convenient for patients has only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. By shifting care to settings that best match the individual patient’s needs, we can optimize the patient experience while improving the overall efficiency of our healthcare system, especially in times of challenge as we have recently seen.  This shift to new care settings is one of three irreversible forces that BD sees driving the future of healthcare, and we’re focused on continuing to advance our solutions to accelerate these transitions in care.  

Testing made simpler, less invasive and more convenient 

The COVID-19 pandemic put the importance of testing front and center, and further accelerated a paradigm shift in the diagnostic market. Shifting away from acute care hospitals and large laboratory settings, the rapid expansion of point of care (POC) testing brings collection and testing closer to the patient. With the consumerization of testing, adoption of telehealth and remote monitoring, simplified and safer collection and testing technology, and a favorable regulatory and reimbursement environment, the POC diagnostic segment is here to stay in a post-pandemic era. With BD’s expertise and leadership in the diagnostic space, we can have a profound impact in the future by expanding the types of diseases we can test for via both professional and self-test options, applying cutting-edge diagnostic technologies to enable further convenience, cost-effectiveness and speed, while combining the high sensitivity of molecular testing with rapid time-to-results at the point of care.  

We also see the potential to redefine blood collection and make it easier and more convenient for patients to get the diagnostic tests they need for a more complete picture of their health. To enable that, we’re focused on developing the next generation of technologies that make testing more accessible and less invasive for patients to enable tests to be performed in more convenient locations, such as a retail pharmacy or even in their home.  

Medication management across the care continuum 

Twenty years ago, we introduced the BD Pyxis™ automated dispensing cabinet, which redefined how medications were stored and dispensed in hospitals, bringing them closer to the patient for more efficient administration. Today, through automation, robotics and data analytics integration, BD is redefining how medications are stored and dispensed in retail pharmacies and ambulatory centers — which will be increasingly important as non-acute care settings like ambulatory surgery centers continue to take on care that would traditionally happen in hospitals. We’re focused on addressing the unique pain points of non-acute and retail settings with capabilities such as automation and secure storage, as well as enterprise data and analytics integration to help drive medication safety, inventory visibility and improved clinician efficiency.   

A better standard of care for incontinence at home  

Patients who live with incontinence often wear incontinence underwear at home, limit fluid intake or make other lifestyle changes that impact their lives in one way or another. To help patients manage incontinence at home, we’ve launched the BD Purewick Urine Collection System, which uses the same external female catheter used by hospitals. We’ll keep advancing in this area to improve the user and caregiver experience with improved comfort and ease of placement. By 2025, we see an opportunity to significantly increase the number of people we serve with urology products used in the home, including through new-to-world solutions.  

These are just a few of the ways we’re helping enable the shift to new care settings. To further drive this shift, making technologies smarter and more connected will be essential to unlocking the full potential of care to aid patients throughout their health journeys.