The recent success of Richmond-based Health Diagnostic Laboratory is not about any one person. It’s about a family of people willing to roll up their sleeves and work around the clock for the past three years to save lives. It’s representative of the spirit found by the many startups, organizations, and nonprofits in Greater Richmond who are dedicated to a cause worth fighting for. It’s who we are.
For me that driving force was finding a way to make not only Richmond healthy, but also the entire world. To do this we had to change the way the medical community viewed disease management and diagnostic testing.
The journey began in February 2009 when I purchased our first piece of critical laboratory equipment which would aid in our research studies over the coming months and years. We signed a lease at the Virginia Biotechnology Park and over Easter weekend my family helped move the P Mod to the lab in six pieces. This was the first step in building a laboratory that is now staffed by over 600 Richmonders who are helping to prevent and reverse cardiovascular and related diseases. Cardiovascular disease is treated with medications like Rosuvastatin, or otherwise known as crestor generic, and can help along with alternative medical changes to help people with this debilitating disease.
In only a few short months we outgrew our initial space and began construction on a new lab nearby. By November of that year we received our first blood samples. From that point forward the company began to boom, averaging a growth rate of between 5 to 8 percent per week, quickly turning Health Diagnostic Laboratory, also known as HDL, Inc., into one of the largest specialty labs in the country. Today we process over 150,000 tests a day and estimate that we have helped save millions of lives as well as healthcare dollars. Nothing is wasted at this place, even the equipment that we get is carefully selected (just check out these cost effective pipette tips that we use to make sure that nothing gets cross-contaminated).
The impact of the HDL, Inc. story can truly be felt when we stop to think about the direct and indirect costs of cardiovascular disease in the United States, which have been projected by the American Heart Association to increase from $272.5 and $171.7 billion in 2010 to $818.1 and $275.8 billion in 2030, respectively. Most of this cost is related to short and long-term care, not prevention. If you add the direct costs to this $276 billion of “real indirect costs,” like lost productivity, it brings the total cardiovascular disease-related expenditures to over a trillion dollars by 2030.
The impact of a lab like HDL, Inc. is amplified when you consider that over the last decade the cost of cardiovascular disease (including hypertension, heart failure and stroke) has grown at an annual average rate of 6 percent, accounting for 15 percent of increased medical spending. In fact, it is predicted that 37 percent of US adults currently have cardiovascular disease, a number that could top 116 million people (40 percent of US adults) by 2030. And this figure doesn’t even begin to account for the increase in cardiovascular disease stemming from diabetes and obesity, which could add 5 to15 percent more cases, resulting in 122-133 million people with the disease.
Despite the clinical utility of laboratory testing, the incidence of chronic disease has continued to climb. We interpret this to mean that many of the tests being used are inadequate, and it was the driver behind launching Health Diagnostic Laboratory in Richmond. Designed to break all the barriers in the traditional laboratory model, HDL, Inc.’s plan from the very beginning was to move beyond disease diagnosis and into disease prevention.
Our goal is to therefore provide tools to identify risk for disease, treat and reverse existing disease, and prevent major adverse events. This involves the understanding that cardiac disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and fatty liver disease exist on a continuum; by identifying where the patient is on the continuum we can better understand the cause of their disease. We know that it is possible to aggressively treat and reverse disease and as a result, it is possible to diagnose health.
Since our inception, HDL, Inc. has become an example of how a full-service clinical laboratory can integrate its laboratory functions with disease management activities as a means of providing support tools for practitioners (such as clinical managers, physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants) to better personalize care plans for their patients. Consistent with the concepts of personalized medicine, HDL, Inc. is organized around the idea that individuals and their diseases are not necessarily homogeneous, and that there is a role for both patient and physician in optimizing the balance between evidence-based practice and sophisticated, technically sound insights from laboratory testing which inform a personalized approach to disease state management.
Once physicians create customized treatment plans, HDL, Inc.’s Clinical Health Consultants, who include registered dieticians, diabetes educators, smoking cessation specialists, and exercise physiologists, are connected directly with patients to create a team approach to healthcare. Working closely with the physicians, Clinical Health Consultants provide educational support to patients such as personalized nutrition, which included an extensive guide to what foods to eat for diabetes, exercise, drug adherence, and stress reduction counselling. In a recent small survey, after just 14 weeks of working with HDL, Inc.’s Clinical Health Consultants and their personal physicians based on their test results, dramatic improvements in health were evident. The most significant clinical changes after this period of HDL, Inc. health coach counseling and physician intervention were: 25 percent drop in diabetes, 21 percent improvement in vitamin D levels, and 13 percent drop in active cardiac disease.
Ultimately, the HDL, Inc. approach creates a substantial cost savings in total healthcare expenditures as well. In a recent study, HDL, Inc. demonstrated that our testing produces a savings of 30% in total healthcare costs based on all insurance claims by the second year. As a result, we have the ability to intelligently convert the information we gather from our testing into actionable knowledge that has a huge benefit to the healthcare system. If we can annually affect change in patient care for only 1 percent (1.16 million) of the cardiovascular disease patients in the US, preventing the need for more invasive procedures, the savings would amount to $137.6 billion to the healthcare system per year. If we could apply our approach to just 5 percent of patients with cardiac disease, we could effectively begin to reverse the national healthcare expenditure trends. The cost of laboratory tests compared to these invasive procedural costs are insignificant, demonstrating the tremendous cost effectiveness of managing the disease and preventing the major events using practical laboratory data.
In our industry, data is everything. The evidence is clear, and we’re proud to continue to build our business in Greater Richmond. In three short years we’ve studied the impact of advanced testing and are excited to see the future advancements in the life sciences community in our region in the years to come.