Alere Ltd: the new name for Inverness Medical UK Ltd
Who we are
Inverness Medical is a global diagnostics and health management company employing more than 11,000 people worldwide. We offer an extensive range of products and services that allow healthcare decisions to be taken at the point of care, helping to move diagnostic services 'closer to home'. Responding to changing healthcare demands we have recently invested in health management resources and in the USA the Alere health services company is already one of the leading providers of health management programmes.
What we do
We bring together diagnostic products and health screening services to enable healthcare providers to perform diagnostic testing in the clinic, community, hospital or home. This might be lipid testing as part of a Health Check programme, rapid HIV screening to find 'undiagnosed' disease, BNP testing for the exclusion of heart failure, or D-dimer to rule out DVT. We also have a number of innovative tests for use in the hospital environment. Our rapid cardiac markers dramatically reduce A&E admissions by excluding AMI in patients presenting with chest pain and 2010 sees the introduction of a pioneering single test for the exclusion of early pre-eclampsia. Many of our rapid test products, most notably for Clostridium difficile and Legionella screening, are also used in the hospital laboratory where they have established an excellent reputation for providing precise, accurate results.
The benefits of rapid diagnostics
By improving access to diagnostic testing we can help you to adopt different pathways for delivering healthcare and allow you to allocate resources in ways that benefit both you and your patients. Our rapid tests provide on-the-spot results that support immediate treatment decisions, improve outcomes and improve the patient experience. Unnecessary referrals and admissions are reduced and moving care from hospitals to the community helps to meet the Quality Productivity Challenge (QPC) of providing better services for less money.
Point of care testing also plays a key role in addressing health inequalities by delivering diagnostic services at the heart of those communities that don't usually engage with traditional health services. The 'hard to reach' groups are usually those with the worst health indicators and are a major target for current Government initiatives.
With the current focus very much on prevention rather than cure, rapid, timely and meaningful information plays a key role in health awareness/improvement campaigns, allowing people to make informed choices about their own health - one of the key Department of Health directives.
Why do we need to change our name?
Inverness Medical now owns many leading healthcare brands and in order to make it easier for our customers to identify and understand the full depth and breadth of our extensive range, we have decided to re-brand our business and most of our products and services under a unified, easily recognisable name.
Alere, meaning to nurture, care for or support, was chosen as our new name to reflect the company's focus on delivering preventative, people-centred and productive healthcare.
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