Long before the pandemic began, people have been seeking more convenient and cost-effective healthcare than the traditional primary care or hospital care settings offer. COVID supercharged that need as the pandemic brought uncertainty about access combined with a fear of exposure to the virus. As a result, the opening in the traditional healthcare market has widened.

Urgent care centers, drop-in testing facilities, retail pharmacies and health clinics that recognize the need to evolve the traditional healthcare system have a long-term opportunity to retain this customer base. Providing comfort and care now gets patients in the door – but patients have the potential to be retained for years to come if these healthcare settings continue to expand and diversify their services and programs.  

In particular, because of COVID, more people have become accustomed to the convenience and comfort of receiving laboratory quality testing care in alternative settings. This has created a new standard for developing and administering future tests and an opportunity to grow the existing customer base.

The pandemic has helped educate the public about the benefits of accessible, rapid antigen testing – including reliable and convenient results within 15 minutes. With COVID-19 now added to the list of contagious diseases to monitor whenever common symptoms arise, testing at a higher degree of accessibility has the potential to become a norm, whether it’s testing before a flight, or if showing general symptoms of a virus.

Given the accessibility of testing in alternative care settings, receiving a test result when respiratory symptoms set in can become as commonplace as treating a sprained ankle. The convenience and easy access of testing will be particularly useful for people who interact with the public every day, like teachers and students, flight attendants, manufacturing professionals – the list goes on. Sites can capitalize on this opportunity by offering not only COVID-19 testing, but also other common respiratory tract infections like Influenza, Group A Strep, and Respiratory Syncytial Virus.

BD, a long-time global leader in diagnostic testing, is supporting the effort to boost the use of rapid testing in a post-COVID world. With the BD Veritor ^TM Plus System, testing is easy to implement and use regularly, low cost, doesn’t require sophisticated lab equipment or highly trained medical professionals, can be performed in a CLIA waived point-of-care setting and, most importantly, can provide test results in as little as 15 minutes. Come flu season, BD’s combined assay takes about 15 minutes to run on the BD Veritor™ Plus System and distinguishes between SARS-CoV-2, influenza A and influenza B, by providing definitive positive or negative individual digital display readouts for all three. Having the ability to run a rapid combination test to distinguish between these viral infections can help save time and resources.

COVID-19 has changed many of the public’s expectations around testing and access to healthcare. And with that new mindset, there is an opportunity for non-acute care health providers, like urgent care centers, drop-in testing facilities, retail pharmacies and health clinics, to win the business of new patients who are looking for access, convenience and affordability for services like COVID-19 and flu testing in a non-acute setting today and for the long term.

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• These products have not been FDA cleared or approved; but have been authorized by FDA under EUA for use by authorized laboratories
• The BD Veritor™ System for Rapid Detection of SARS-CoV-2 & Flu A+B has been authorized only for the detection of proteins from SARS-CoV-2, influenza A and influenza B, not for any other viruses or pathogens; the BD Veritor™ System for Rapid Detection of SARS-CoV-2 has been authorized only for the detection of proteins from SARS-CoV-2, not for any other viruses or pathogens; and,
• These products are only authorized for the duration of the declaration that circumstances exist justifying the authorization of emergency use of in vitro diagnostics for detection and/or diagnosis of COVID-19 under Section 564(b)(1) of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, 21 U.S.C. § 360bbb-3(b)(1), unless the declaration is terminated or authorization is revoked sooner.