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Quest Diagnostics

APHL partnered with Quest Diagnostics to send electronic laboratory reports (ELR) through the AIMS Platform to all public health agencies (PHAs). This public/private partnership yielded significant cost-savings for Quest and eliminated the need for manual reporting—improving the quality and timeliness of the data reported and enabling public health to quickly act on potential health threats.

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The Problem

State laws require laboratories to report results to public health for certain state-reportable conditions. While electronic reporting is faster, more efficient, and more accurate, the effort required to onboard ELR with each PHA can be an insurmountable burden to the laboratory.  

Quest Diagnostics, a leading provider of diagnostic information services, processes approximately 206 million requisitions annually. Quest manages at least three laboratory information management systems (LIMS) across its facilities. If each LIMS had to connect to each PHA, complete coverage would potentially require the onboarding, testing and continued maintenance of more than 150 point-to-point connections, each with its own messaging requirements and format. Quest needed a streamlined solution to onboard its laboratories to send ELR to PHAs that could be maintained with limited overhead. 

The Solution

APHL collaborated with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Quest to design and build a technical solution for centralized reporting and a streamlined onboarding process for PHAs. Quest implemented one HL7 2.5.1 implementation guide across all its laboratories and now sends ELR using a single point-to-point connection with AIMS. The structure and content of these messages are consistent for all ELRs so that Quest developers maintain a single messaging standard across all its systems. Quest sends ELR to AIMS via VPN, where it is validated and routed to the appropriate PHA within the connected network using each PHA's preferred transport protocol. 

The Outcome

The Quest ELR project represented a paradigm shift from point-to-point connections towards a more efficient spoke-and-hub model. By 2018, ELR reports from Quest had increased five-fold, from about 3 million in 2015 to 16 million in 2018, accounting for 33% of national ELR volume. As a result of this increase, the total national percentage of laboratory reports sent electronically grew by 14%, from 75% to 89%. As of summer 2025, Quest had sent over 300 million ELR messages via the AIMS Platform to PHAs. On a practical level, this increase in ELR translates to timely, more complete, usable data available to public health analysts, strengthening our ability to respond to emerging public health threats. 

The Impact

  • Staff hours saved 
  • Streamlined IT solution 
  • Real-time data 
  • Accelerated implementation and onboarding 
  • Successful public/private partnership 

Learn more about our partnership with Quest Diagnostics:

Fact Sheet
2025
Quest Diagnostics: More Efficient Electronic Laboratory Reporting Through a Public/Private Partnership
Learn how Quest Diagnostics leveraged public/private partnerships to centralize electronic laboratory reporting (ELR) from public health agencies. Part of the Innovations in Informatics: Laboratory Success Stories series.
Informatics