Building Integrated Testing Programs for Infectious Diseases

Abstract

In the past 2 decades, testing services for diseases such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), tuberculosis, and malaria have expanded dramatically. Investments in testing capacity and supportive health systems have often been disease specific, resulting in siloed testing programs with suboptimal capacity, reduced efficiency, and limited ability to introduce additional tests or respond to new outbreaks. Emergency demand for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) testing overcame these silos and demonstrated the feasibility of integrated testing. Moving forward, an integrated public laboratory infrastructure that services multiple diseases, including SARS-CoV-2, influenza, HIV, tuberculosis, hepatitis, malaria, sexually transmitted diseases, and other infections, will help improve universal healthcare delivery and pandemic preparedness. However, integrated testing faces many barriers including poorly aligned health systems, funding, and policies. Strategies to overcome these include greater implementation of policies that support multidisease testing and treatment systems, diagnostic network optimization, bundled test procurement, and more rapid spread of innovation and best practices across disease programs.

Keywords: COVID-19; HIV; TB; diagnostics; integration.