Quest
As diagnostics become readily accessible, health-seekers are rolling up their sleeves.
The latest: Quest Diagnostics launched three fitness-focused blood tests available on its consumer-facing questhealth.com.
Offering tiers for general wellness and elite performance, the panels (scheduled online but taken at a Quest location) provide insight into endurance, nutrition, energy, hydration, and hormone levels, plus muscle and recovery status.
What it means: Once strictly clinical, the pandemic accelerated Quest’s mission to become a “consumer lifestyle brand.” With decreasing costs for once-complex tests, the diagnostics company is all in on health-focused consumers who crave personalized data.
Not alone, they’ll be joining the likes of Everly Health, LetsGetChecked, and more in making routine blood tests the standard for preventative health, athletic performance, and holistic wellness.
Fluid situation. COVID-19 brought at-home testing into the mainstream, but the development of ultra-precise tech and next-gen wearables have been unbundling the laboratory for years.
Coming to fruition, a performance diagnostics revolution is taking place across nutrition, metabolic health, hydration, and more.
- Nutrition: Elo Health and Rootine use blood biomarkers to personalize supplements, while Inside Tracker uses AI to decode nutritional deficiencies for healthspan optimization.
- Metabolic Health: Levels and Supersapiens use Abbott-made continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) for metabolic health platforms, while Abbott itself is debuting wearables for glucose, lactate, ketones, and more.
- Hydration: Reading sweat through skin patches, Gatorade/Epicore’s Gx, FLOWBIO, Nix Biosensors, hDrop, and more deliver real-time data on hydration and electrolytes.
Elsewhere… COR is bringing the laboratory home with blood spectrometers the size of a smart speaker. Lumen’s breathalyzer turns metabolic data into meal, activity, and sleep recommendations.
And Viome, which just raised $67M, is expanding beyond gut health-focused stool sample kits with at-home saliva tests for chronic diseases and cancers.
Punchline: Consumers are taking more ownership of their health. From wearables to mail-order diagnostics, targeting performance-minded users is a wedge into the broader market of health-seekers.
