What commercializing diagnostics taught me about complexity

I’ve spent my career on the commercial side of diagnostics: strategy, launch, and the long, unglamorous work of getting a good test adopted. If it taught me one thing, it’s humility. The innovations that looked like sure things often stalled. And the breakthroughs usually turned on a connection nobody had made yet, somewhere out in the system rather than in the lab.

Here’s some of what stuck with me.

The science is rarely the bottleneck

I’ve watched genuinely excellent diagnostics struggle. Not because the technology was wrong, but because the path to the patient was broken: the right clinician never saw the right patient at the right moment. In rare disease that gap is widest of all. The hard question usually isn’t can we detect this? It’s can we find the people who need it, and reach them before it’s too late?

Trust is the real currency of adoption

Nothing gets adopted at scale without trust, and trust is fragile. Clinicians and health systems won’t build on a result they can’t reproduce, or a definition they can’t see inside. Early on I learned to distrust any claim I couldn’t re-derive myself. That habit turned out to be a commercial principle as much as a scientific one. Reproducible. Governed. Explainable. Those aren’t engineering niceties. They’re what make people willing to act.

Technology should amplify the front line, not replace it

Every wave of technology tempts us to ask it to be the expert. I’ve never seen that sell, and I’ve never seen it work. What works is narrower: technology that does what people can’t, reading an entire population tirelessly against criteria experts have already agreed on, then handing judgment back to the clinician. The expertise stays with the people who earned it. The tool just helps them reach further.

Innovation and access are the same problem

We tend to treat innovation and access as separate departments. They aren’t. An innovation that never reaches patients hasn’t failed in the lab. It’s simply stranded on the way to the clinic. The work I care about is closing that gap: getting industry, clinicians, and technology pulling in the same direction, toward the right patient reaching the right care, with outcomes you can actually measure.

None of these lessons are new. What is new is that we can finally act on them across a whole population instead of one chart at a time. After twenty-five years, that’s the part worth getting right.

— Raymond Tarr, CEO & Founder, Sagacity Diagnostics

This article reflects the author’s perspective and is not medical advice.