The company had net income of $3.8 million in fiscal 1978 (the year ended September 30, 1978) on revenues of $53.4 million. for first place in the clinical laboratory testing field, which had grown into a $12 –billion –a –year business. MetPath was, by 1979, challenging Damon Corp. Overall, MetPath ’s average billing per patient transaction was only $9. The tests were being processed at a highly automated central laboratory in Hackensack, New Jersey, with 80 percent of the results delivered to the client within 24 hours after collection of the specimen. It was offering, in 11 cities, more than 600 laboratory tests to physicians, hospitals, and institutions and performing more than two million lab tests a month from specimens of more than 150,000 patients. company devoted entirely to clinical laboratory services. Corning Glass Works bought ten percent of its stock in 1973.īy 1975 MetPath had one of the best equipped and largest medical laboratories in the world and was the largest U.S. The company began turning a profit in 1971 and, beginning in 1974, made money each year. In 1972 Brown spent more than $1 million on two AutoChemist units, which raised the number of blood tests MetPath could perform automatically to 25 and saved significantly on costly chemical reagents needed for analysis.

Two years later he invested in a $55,000 device that automatically performed 12 common blood tests, charging $5.50, compared with more than $40 charged by hospitals and medical laboratories. Brown, a pathologist who later said he was “amazed at the sky –high test prices charged by hospitals and clinics, ” founded what was originally Metropolitan Pathological Laboratory in 1967 with $500 and initially ran it out of his Manhattan apartment. In 1981 these figures were $374 million and 32 percent, respectively.Ĭoming ’s clinical laboratory testing did not begin, however, until it acquired MetPath Inc. In 1977 Coming ’s health and sciences activities were consolidated into a single operating division with sales amounting to $221 million and net income at 12 percent of the parent company ’s total. In 1976 the company had a medical products division making electrodes, pHmeters, electrometers, biomedical instruments and systems, photometers, electrophoresis equipment, and densitometers in Medford, Massachusetts, and in Palo Alto, California. The new blood –gas apparatus could not, in 1977, be produced fast enough to keep up with demand.īy 1975 Corning also had begun marketing white blood cell analyzers to automate one of the last blood tests still being performed manually in clinical laboratories. When instrumentation began to replace test tube, flask, and beaker chemistry in the 1960s, Corning added to the primitive meters it was already making a high –powered pH –measuring instrument designed to find how well a critically ill patient ’s lungs were exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide. Its Pyrex glassware -which spawned a lucrative cookware line -put the company in the laboratory business as far back as World War I. The origins of Quest Diagnostics were in the laboratory glassware of Corning Glass Works.

Corning Medical Products and MetPath to 1982 The company ’s customers include independent physicians and physician groups, health maintenance organizations and other managed –care groups, hospitals, and government agencies. It offers a broad range of routine and esoteric services used by the medical profession in the diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of disease and other medical conditions. is one of the largest clinical laboratory testing companies in the United States. Employees: 16,300 Sales: $1.53 billion (1997) Stock Exchanges: New York Ticker Symbol: DGX SICs: 8071 Medical Laboratories Public Company Incorporated: 1967 as MetPath Inc. One Malcolm Avenue Teterboro, New Jersey 07608 U.S.A.

Quest diagnostics incorporated