Community Report
2020

Delivering Services Designed for You

We put ourselves in your shoes and work from there to develop new ways to make it easier for you to get the diagnostic testing and insights you need to make decisions about your health. Your health is our purpose.

At the centre of our values is the customer. Every day we ask, what do our customers need today and what will consumers of health care services need five years from now? Thinking this way is what leads us to constantly innovate and improve quality, access and convenience for our consumers – whether they are customers we serve at our collection sites, health care providers in the community or businesses. In 2020, we introduced many new services, tools and products. Some were sparked by COVID-19, others by our continuous pursuit to advance our consumer strategy focus to anticipate changes in our consumers’ demands and expectations, and overall health care landscape. All were driven by our purpose: making diagnostic insights accessible so that our customers are empowered to make choices to live their best lives.

Innovating for a Healthier You

Partnerships are central to our business approach, particularly when it comes to making services easily available to customers. Our most recent collaboration is the new virtual care offering available on our my MyCareCompass portal, offered in partnership with TELUS Health MyCare (formerly Babylon by TELUS Health), Appletree Medical Group, Maple and WELL Health.

Continuous Improvements Driven by Customer Focus & Health Equity

At LifeLabs, we believe that customer focus and innovation go hand-in-hand. To be centred around the customer, we must push the limits on continuous improvement in a number of areas, including technology, methods, processes, skills and equipment. We recently set up a cross-functional project team to find ways to speed up our processes so we can handle higher testing volumes.

Providing Access to Care for Remote Communities in
British Columbia Through Drone Technology

Innovating for Cancer Treatment and Prevention

Accelerated Outcomes through Enhanced Testing Platforms

At LifeLabs, we know that speed and quality matter when it comes to test results, and over the past year we have made significant investments to upgrade our mid-low volume Chemistry Immunoassay testing platforms. Immunoassays tested on these analyzers evaluate a wide range of health disorders, including hepatitis, hormone disorders, cardiac issues, cancer and renal disease. The Roche e801 Immunoassay Platform went live in Ontario and British Columbia last year and provides enhanced capacity, improved efficiency, and faster turnaround times, which can make all the difference in a customer’s health.

E-Ordering

Strengthening Data & Privacy

Data protection and privacy is central to everything we do. Through our partnership with experts, the cyber research community, the health care sector, governments and IT companies, we are committed to becoming a global leader in protecting health care data and have taken a number of steps to do so, including…

New Tests Available

Health care and laboratory science are constantly evolving, and we are always adding capacity to perform new kinds of testing to meet the growing need for sophisticated and personalized health information.

One significant accomplishment in this area is the addition of a new national platform, based in British Columbia, for performing hereditary genetics testing. Complex planning and teamwork across several departments were required to make this happen. We met Canadian standards for genetics testing with flying colours, and introduced this service in 2020.

We also launched a new Comprehensive Hormone Insights (CHI) test. CHI is a detailed urine analysis that measures steroid hormones and their metabolites, addressing hormone-related issues such as sleep and mood disturbances, polycystic ovarian syndrome, weight gain, skin conditions and low sex drive, to name a few. Specimen collection for the new test is more convenient for customers and also offers improved results reporting.

Providing Safe Service During the Pandemic

One of our top priorities is making sure that customers can conveniently access the diagnostic services they need. In this regard, 2020 offered some unusual challenges. When the pandemic was declared, we immediately adopted evidence-based protocols to keep our staff and customers safe from infection. These included screening customers, providing hand sanitizer and equipping our staff with Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), such as masks and gloves, and offering more appointment bookings online as an effective way to further reduce waiting rooms and add convenience for our customers. Our Save My Spot app was added as a convenience to offer safe service during the pandemic. Because of the protocols we put in place, there were no cases of employee or customer transmission of COVID-19 at our locations.