Outpatient care structure for medical laboratory analyses in Switzerland

The FOPH's transAL-2 project is currently revising the analysis list and its tariffs, i.e. the medical laboratory services that are reimbursed by the OKP. Polynomics has analysed outpatient laboratory care in Switzerland with health insurer data as part of transAL-2. The analyses show that the types of hospital laboratory defined in Article 54 KVV do not exist in reality. Overall, contract and hospital laboratories provided medical analyses worth around CHF 1.2 billion at the expense of the OKP in 2019. The heterogeneity between the service providers is very high. For example, the seven largest laboratory chains provided 80% of the gross services of the contract laboratories and the five university hospitals provided 40% of the gross outpatient services of the hospital laboratories. The range of services, measured by the number of different tests, also varies greatly. It can also be seen that the contract laboratories tend to be located in the large cities and regional centres, while the regional distribution of the hospital laboratories is more diverse.