Hospitals are increasingly moving toward a "hybrid" laboratory model, where they maintain a small, rapid-response lab for STAT tests while outsourcing all non-urgent and high-complexity testing to reference laboratories. This shift is driven by the need for financial sustainability; maintaining a full-service lab with all the latest equipment is often prohibitively expensive for individual hospitals. By partnering with reference labs, hospital systems can offer their patients access to thousands of different tests while focusing their own internal resources on immediate patient care and emergency stabilization.

The Clinical Reference Laboratory Market is benefiting from this outsourcing trend, which creates long-term, stable revenue streams through multi-year contracts. Many reference labs are now setting up "hub-and-spoke" models where they place specialized staff or equipment directly within a hospital’s facility to provide a more integrated service. This collaborative approach reduces the logistical hurdles of sample transport and ensures that the clinical expertise of the reference lab is available to the hospital’s medical staff in a near-real-time capacity.