Good News for Labs of the Future
The Lab Industry Strategic Outlook: Market Trends & Analysis 2009 from the Washington G-2 Reports predicts serious growth for the clinical laboratory through 2017-90%, or $98.4 billion in revenue by 2017. This immense growth will be largely driven by factors like increased genetic and esoteric testing, consumer driven healthcare, aging demographics and expanded access to healthcare.
These numbers can be daunting to an industry already threatened by a workforce shortage in the next couple of years, due to a large portion of the workforce approaching retirement age. Luckily, the clinical lab is constantly improving efficiencies through automation, smoother information exchange and workflow efficacy programs like Lean and Six Sigma. Continued recruiting of students into clinical laboratory science programs will remain a critical necessity, but the industry seems fully capable of handling even this kind of extreme growth.