HealthCare Market
As you must be aware the entire Health Care Market is divided into three broad categories:
- 1. Diagnostics
- 2. Preventive
- 3. Therapeutics
Diagnostics: Deals with the application of laboratory tests and techniques to find out the cause of the disease.
Additionally, these laboratory tests are useful to the physician:
- To confirm and rule out his / her clinical impression
- To establish Prognosis (Prognosis deals with forecasting the course / progress of the disease)
- To monitor treatment
Thus a physician needs the laboratory findings to assist in diagnosis and management of the patient.
Preventive: relates with the infection control in the hospitals.
Therapeutics: is the branch of medicine that deals with different methods of treatment and therapy (healing).
As we only dealing with diagnostic reagents and preventive reagents, we will restrict our discussions to these areas of healthcare
Diagnostic reagents: Can be broadly divided into many functional areas, these include:
- Immunohematology (Blood Grouping/Blood Banking)
- Hemostasis (Coagulation)
- Serology (study of blood serum and components)
- Clinical Chemistry (deals with the study of chemical processes and substances present in the living beings).
- Clinical Microbiology (deals with the identification of the microorganisms that cause disease).
Preventive reagents: Includes reagents known as biocides (antimicrobial agents). Biocides help in killing the microbes present on living surfaces (skin, body parts etc) or on non living surfaces (hard surfaces). Based on their utility, these preventive reagents or biocides are grouped under different ranges:
- Skin disinfectants
- Environment & surface
- Instruments
To know more about these sections let us get into the respective learning modules.