Covid-era access pushed consumer diagnostics into the mainstream
Direct-to-consumer diagnostics have moved from a niche concept to a visible part of everyday health care, and the recent discussion at MedCity INVEST Digital Health in Dallas traced that rise to a combination of timing, access and patient demand. Leaders from Jona, Labcorp and Evvy described a market that was already forming around self-directed testing, then accelerated sharply during the pandemic when patients became more willing, and in many cases more able, to test themselves at home.
Leo Grady, chief executive of gut microbiome testing company Jona, framed the shift as the latest phase in a longer consumer movement. People have wanted to measure and understand themselves for years, he said, pointing to the growth of genetic testing and to home collection models that helped normalize the idea that clinically relevant data could arrive outside a traditional clinic visit. Covid-19 then compressed that evolution. Patients were at home, health concerns were far more immediate, and temporary regulatory changes made it easier to ship tests across state lines and access clinical-grade testing without going through a physician’s office first.
A single behavior changed the market: patients started testing on their own and discovered they liked the control.
Personal control, easier logistics and faster adoption changed demand
Rachel Miller, head of product and growth at Labcorp, described the consumer diagnostics sector as the product of three converging forces: a market that was already prepared, a strong product-market fit and an adoption curve that Covid flattened and accelerated. For decades, clinicians have told patients to take control of their health, but the data needed to do that often stayed locked inside the health system. Consumer testing changed the flow of information. Patients could collect samples at home or on their own schedule, and the process removed some of the friction that often discourages preventive testing or follow-up evaluation.
The experience itself matters here. When a diagnostic can be completed at home, the burden shifts from navigating a clinic workflow to fitting health care into daily life. That matters for routine screening, for repeated monitoring and for patients who want answers before symptoms become severe enough to trigger an office visit. The market response suggests that convenience is not a cosmetic feature; it is a clinical access tool. In a system where delays and administrative steps often suppress testing, a simpler pathway can produce new data, earlier awareness and a stronger sense of ownership over one’s own health.
Women’s health exposed the gap between available technology and routine care
Pita Navarro, chief scientific officer at Evvy, said the women’s health sector has grown more slowly than some other consumer diagnostics categories, even though the clinical need is substantial. Evvy focuses on vaginal microbiome testing, a field Navarro said became especially compelling during Covid. While vaccines and viral identification advanced within months, routine gynecologic evaluation still often relied on visual inspection and microscopy. The contrast sharpened her view of the gap between biomedical innovation and common practice.
In her telling, the larger question was not whether better tools existed, but why they were not being used more broadly in women’s health. Vaginal health remains a leading reason women seek care, yet misdiagnosis remains common. Navarro pointed to the vaginal microbiome as a biologic signal with implications that extend well beyond local symptoms, including associations with cervical cancer, sexually transmitted infection and infertility. In clinical terms, that means a seemingly narrow diagnostic window may capture a much broader set of reproductive and infectious risks.
The microbiome is not just a specimen; it is a biologic record of a changing reproductive environment.
Consumer diagnostics can collect data the health system misses
Navarro also argued that consumer diagnostics can generate datasets the traditional health care system does not reliably capture. Much of modern medicine is organized around what patients need in the moment: treating an infection, addressing a symptom, or clearing a problem on a visit-by-visit basis. Consumer health companies can also measure what patients want to know about themselves, and that includes patterns that may never surface during a short appointment. In a field such as vaginal health, the ability to collect longitudinal data outside the usual clinic setting may reveal recurring issues, symptom clusters or microbial shifts that otherwise remain invisible.
That distinction has practical implications for research and for care delivery. The more data a system captures from patients in real-world settings, the better it can understand variation, recurrence and risk over time. For companies building diagnostics, the value lies not only in the test result itself but in the accumulation of biologic information that can inform future product development and, potentially, earlier intervention. For clinicians, the challenge is how to integrate those data without reducing care to a series of isolated lab values detached from symptoms, reproductive history or treatment goals.
Patients are asking for answers the system often fails to provide
Grady argued that diagnostics were once viewed skeptically inside traditional medicine because they could reveal findings that required follow-up action, while payers often resisted paying for tests that might uncover more work downstream. Yet the patient perspective looks different. Consumers often want more information, not less, especially when they feel underserved or bounced between doctors without a clear explanation for ongoing symptoms.
That demand is one reason consumer diagnostics continue to gain traction. Patients do not merely want a result; they want a story about their own bodies that they can act on. In a health system that often fragments data across specialties, labs and sites of care, the appeal of a single accessible test is obvious. It can offer a sense of control, a faster route to answers and, in some cases, a better starting point for a conversation with a clinician.
The panel’s discussion did not describe a finished market so much as a category still being defined by behavior. Covid normalized at-home testing, regulatory changes expanded access, and companies have found that convenience and self-knowledge can be commercially powerful. The harder question now is how the health system will respond when consumer-generated data become routine rather than exceptional, especially in areas like women’s health where the clinical gap between available technology and day-to-day practice remains wide.