Tell us about Biogroup’s activity?
Biogroup is a group of liberal medical biologists. We are the leading medical biology group in France, with more than 900 laboratories, organized by sector and region, and more than 1,000 biologists. Excluding Covid, we receive more than 100,000 patients per day, that is, almost a third of French biology. At the end of 2021, we were joined by groups in Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Portugal and Switzerland.
What are the ways your sector is taking to provide better care?
Medical biology was way behind in terms of digitization. The objective is to automate repetitive tasks, with little added value. Many processes that go in this direction were launched during the concentration of the sector: for example, the results have not been entered by hand for more than 15 years. In fact, over 70% of lab errors were due to manual entry errors.
We have a legal obligation to keep medical records in digital format for ten years. So we have a colossal amount of untapped medical data. Now we have the size and the tools to investigate. Its exploitation will lead to the discovery of “scores” that will allow us to evaluate a risk and anticipate pathologies: we will go from curative medicine to preventive medicine.
Why has the sector concentrated?
The concentration was a wish of the health authorities, who wanted big players instead of a multitude of small structures, to standardize the level and reliability of the laboratories. For this reason, the law that governs laboratories has imposed Cofrac accreditation, which is based on industrial standards, with high requirements that represent an additional cost that it is impossible to assume as a small isolated structure.
Many biologists nearing retirement have sold to financial groups. Biogroup wanted to keep the exercise liberal and entrepreneurial.
What new projects are you starting up to develop yourself?
70% of a doctor’s decisions are based on biology, and when a small-town doctor wants to know if his patient is having a heart attack, he needs the answer fast. With a Swiss company, we have developed the transport of blood samples with drones. We had authorization in Isère to start in September. This service is reserved for emergency situations, for places of difficult access.
In September we launched the Noratest, a screening test for Alzheimer’s disease using blood tests, marketed by a French Biotech, which we will offer in all our laboratories.
This content was produced with SCRIBEO. The BFMBUSINESS editorial team was not involved in the production of this content.
Source: BFM TV
