MEDLATEC Đà Nẵng, 21 Thái Văn Lung.
My photograph, September 2026.
1. Is Home-Based Healthcare Only for Advanced Economies?
Is home-based healthcare a service that can develop only in the mature health systems of high-income countries?
When people hear “home-based healthcare,” they often picture a physician visiting a patient at home, or hospital treatment continuing after the patient returns home.
Home-based healthcare has developed in different forms from country to country.
In the United Kingdom, NHS Virtual Wards and Hospital at Home programs allow patients who would otherwise need admission to be managed at home or discharged earlier. Some of the monitoring, medication, testing, and treatment traditionally provided in hospital is delivered in the home.
In the United States, Medicare Home Health provides skilled nursing and rehabilitation services at home. When a physician or other qualified medical professional determines that the service is needed and establishes a plan of care, a Home Health Agency delivers the service.
The World Health Organization takes a broader view, treating home-based healthcare as a form of healthcare that can extend prevention, chronic-disease management, and continuing health management into homes and communities.
MEDLATEC’s home-based healthcare in Vietnam takes a different approach from the representative models of high-income countries. MEDLATEC first moved specimen collection into the home and connected it to the diagnostic capacity of a central laboratory. It then added home healthcare and family-doctor services on top of that foundation.
2. Home-Based Healthcare Enters a Thin Primary Care Market
Walk through Đà Nẵng and pharmacies are easy to find. By contrast, the kind of neighborhood clinic familiar in Korea was far less visible than I expected. Đà Nẵng is not a city without medical institutions. Rather, the primary care market between pharmacies and general hospitals is thin.
A neighborhood pharmacy in a residential area of Đà Nẵng.
My photograph, September 2026.
Vietnam has district health centers, commune health stations, and private clinics. It would therefore be wrong to say that primary care does not exist. The issue is not the number of facilities. The issue is how well the first point of medical contact actually works for patients—from minor symptoms to long-term management of chronic disease.
International assessments point in the same direction. The WHO has repeatedly noted the heavy concentration of patients in hospitals and the tendency of many people to use hospitals as their first point of care.
A World Bank study found that annual per-capita use of commune health stations was lowest in urban and peri-urban areas, at 0.39 visits, while it was higher in remote areas, at 1.04 visits (World Bank, 2019b). In other words, public primary care functions most weakly not in rural areas but in cities. This is one reason the Vietnamese government has sought to strengthen the grassroots health system: to reduce excessive concentration in higher-level hospitals and provide care earlier, closer to where people live.
Hai Chau General Hospital, Đà Nẵng.
My photograph, September 2026.
The problem is not simply the number of physicians. Trust in primary care, payment and incentives, the distribution of health professionals, and patterns of patient choice—including the ability to go directly to higher-level hospitals—all interact. The key point is not that primary care is absent, but that it functions weakly.
The Vietnamese government has long recognized this problem. A family-medicine pilot launched in 2013 was intended to ease overcrowding in higher-level hospitals and strengthen primary care. It included long-term follow-up of chronic conditions and, when needed, visits to patients’ homes. Standards for licensing and staffing home healthcare institutions were later specified in more detail, and the 2023 Law on Medical Examination and Treatment explicitly brought home-based medical care, family medicine, mobile medical care, and telemedicine into the institutional framework.
The institutional basis for home-based healthcare is gradually taking shape. But how much private home healthcare is actually financed by health insurance remains a separate question.
Home-based healthcare in Vietnam is expanding from two directions. Government policy is trying to reduce hospital congestion and strengthen care closer to where people live. Private companies are creating services that reduce the inconvenience of traveling to a hospital and waiting for care. MEDLATEC is one case that began with testing and diagnostics.
3. How Does MEDLATEC’s Home-Based Healthcare Model Work?
How did MEDLATEC emerge in Vietnam’s thin primary care market?
The information board at the MEDLATEC Đà Nẵng testing center.
My photograph, September 2026.
A sign on the exterior of MEDLATEC Đà Nẵng states that the center performs more than 500 medical tests, from basic to advanced. On first sight I took MEDLATEC for a diagnostics company. It operates both center-based testing, in which customers come to the facility, and home-visit testing, in which staff travel to the customer’s home.
Registration plaques for the laboratory,
the internal-medicine clinic and the home healthcare service at MEDLATEC Đà Nẵng.
My photograph, September 2026.
The registration plaques beside the entrance told a different story. At the same address I found three separately licensed and registered entities side by side: a laboratory, a specialist internal-medicine clinic, and a home healthcare service. Clinical care and home healthcare have been built into the same site as the diagnostics business.
The floor directory inside the MEDLATEC Đà Nẵng building.
My photograph, September 2026.
The floor directory inside the building showed the same structure. Registration and specimen collection, clinical consultation, laboratory testing, and molecular-biology functions are connected within a single building. Home-based services do not end with a visit outside the facility; they are designed to feed back into this base.
A Small Idea Found in Japan
This structure was not complete from the beginning. It started with a small home-visit testing service about thirty years ago.
Founder Nguyễn Anh Trí studied medical technology and clinical laboratory science in Japan from 1993 to 1994, where he noticed a particular operating model: patients did not have to come to the laboratory. Specimens could be collected at home and sent to a central laboratory. What he brought back from Japan was not a new treatment technology. It was an idea that reversed the usual sequence in which the patient traveled to the laboratory.
At the time, receiving a diagnostic test in Vietnam generally meant going to a hospital, seeing a doctor, receiving a test order, and then moving on to the laboratory. MEDLATEC changed the sequence. A staff member went to the home to collect the specimen, and the specimen—not the patient—was transported to the laboratory.
In 1996, Nguyễn Anh Trí and several colleagues began the service from a small clinical laboratory in Hanoi. At first, many people did not trust the very idea that they could simply call from home and someone would come to draw blood.
What MEDLATEC first changed was not medical technology. It changed the sequence of access to healthcare.
Why Diagnostics?
Diagnostics is a medical function that can be moved into the home relatively easily. At home, only the specimen—blood, urine, or another sample—needs to be obtained. Expensive equipment and specialized professionals can remain in the central laboratory.
Customers are dispersed; specimens are concentrated.
As the customer base grows, MEDLATEC does not need to build a new hospital in every locality. It can expand the home-visit network and send more specimens into the central laboratory. In effect, it created a hub-and-spoke structure linking homes to a central diagnostic hub.
There is another important distinction. In a traditional physician house call, the doctor goes to the home first. In MEDLATEC’s basic home-testing service, a nurse or laboratory professional goes first to collect the specimen. Analysis is performed at the central laboratory, and medical consultation or additional care follows when indicated by the results. In this sense, MEDLATEC can be described as a model of “Diagnostics-led Home Healthcare.”
The distinction is not about who is legally permitted to draw blood. It is about who moves to whom.
Who Uses It, and Why?
Who uses this service? MEDLATEC presents a broad customer base: older adults, people with mobility limitations, children, pregnant women, and people short on time. What connects these customers is not a particular disease. It is the inconvenience of using a hospital—the travel, the waiting, and the need to return or follow up for results.
At this point, however, the market divides in two. Home-visit testing is a relatively mass-market service. MEDLATEC charges the same test fees as at its own hospitals and clinics and keeps the additional home-visit fee low, at VND 10,000 per visit—about forty US cents. Taken on its own, home testing is therefore difficult to describe as a premium service reserved for high-income customers.
The picture changes as the service moves up to family-doctor care and continuing home health management. A family-doctor package announced by MEDLATEC in 2024 was priced at about VND 7.5 million per year for an individual and VND 20 million for a family, roughly US$290 and US$770 at 2026 exchange rates.
At launch the package was available only in twelve districts of Hanoi. At the time of my visit, Đà Nẵng did not offer it, although—as the registration plaques show—a separately licensed home healthcare service was already operating there. The home-healthcare layer has spread to several cities, while the family-doctor layer built on top of it remains concentrated in the capital.
As service intensity increases, prices rise and the customer’s ability to pay becomes more important. The World Bank has likewise observed that Vietnam’s private home healthcare market is growing mainly among households in large cities that have the ability to pay. Home testing lowers the market threshold. Deeper home healthcare can raise it again.
When Home Testing Becomes Home-Based Healthcare
When home-visit testing was combined with MEDLATEC’s existing testing centers, something emerged that a laboratory alone could not create. Customers who came to the center and customers who provided specimens at home became connected through a single testing-and-diagnostics infrastructure, while a home-visit network, specimen logistics, customer information, digital delivery of results, and connections to medical professionals accumulated together.
At some point, the diagnostics business itself became infrastructure for home-based healthcare.
MEDLATEC then added new functions on top of that infrastructure. With the launch of its family-doctor service in 2024, it expanded into health-status assessment, physician home visits, geriatric assessment, health-management planning, selected mobile tests, wound care, and medication delivery. A business that began with home testing had expanded into home healthcare and continuing medical services.
I cannot conclude that this entire path was designed from the outset. What is clear is that the small home-testing service launched in 1996 built a visit network, logistics, diagnostics, data, and clinical connections over three decades, and that additional medical functions were subsequently layered on top.
4. Can MEDLATEC’s Diagnostics-Led Home Healthcare Become a New Path for Vietnam?
Could MEDLATEC represent one new development path for home-based healthcare in Vietnam?
It is too early to give a definitive answer. But one point is clear: MEDLATEC shows that home-based healthcare can be built in a different sequence from the representative models of high-income countries.
From Hospital to Home, From Testing to Home-Based Healthcare
In the United Kingdom and the United States, trained professionals can also collect specimens in the home without a physician personally making the visit. In the NHS, domiciliary phlebotomy may be provided by a phlebotomist or community nurse following a referral from a GP or another clinician. Under Medicare Home Health in the United States, venipuncture may be performed at home within an established plan of care, although it does not by itself qualify a patient for the benefit.
MEDLATEC’s distinctiveness should therefore not be reduced to “blood collection at home without a doctor.”
In high-income countries, the healthcare system expanded into the home. MEDLATEC moved in the opposite direction: it added “testing that goes to the patient” to an existing testing center and expanded that visit network into home-based healthcare.
Why Does This Path Matter in Vietnam?
Vietnam remains strongly hospital-centered, while primary-care functions are relatively weak. Vietnam’s weak primary care and limited physician supply may also have been important background factors in MEDLATEC’s starting with testing rather than physician home visits.
The advantage of this approach is that it can grow in stages. It does not require hospital-level home healthcare to be built from the beginning. Existing laboratories, medical professionals, and logistics can be used while the service expands with the market. Rather than creating large volumes of entirely new medical resources, it reorganizes and reconnects resources that already exist.
This is worth noting for other low- and middle-income countries as well. Dense primary care, insurance coverage, and a mature home-health system do not necessarily have to be completed before home-based healthcare can begin. A market can start with standardized testing and diagnostics and then add medical functions on top. MEDLATEC’s broader significance lies less in a new technology than in this sequence of development.
How Far Can the Market Expand?
The difficulty begins here. Home testing can reach a relatively broad population with only a small additional fee, but as the service moves toward family-doctor care and continuing home health management, the ability to pay becomes increasingly important. The market-based path shown by MEDLATEC is not automatically a universal pathway to healthcare.
The remaining question is who will pay. The size of the market will depend on whether individuals continue to pay out of pocket, whether private insurance or public health insurance absorbs part of the cost, and whether the service becomes linked to programs for chronic disease or older-adult health management.
The same technical act can also take a different form under different national rules. In Korea, for example, clinical laboratory technologists may draw blood and collect specimens, but they do so under a physician’s direction. Even when the technology is the same, institutions shape the service model.
Not the Answer, but a Different Sequence
It is too early to call MEDLATEC the future of home-based healthcare in Vietnam. But this case clearly shows the possibility of a different path.
MEDLATEC’s customers were not limited to people who were unable to go to a hospital. People who could go to a hospital but wanted to reduce travel and waiting time also entered the market. At the same time, as the service became deeper, new thresholds appeared in the form of income and insurance. The opportunity and the limitation are visible at the same time.
What MEDLATEC shows is not the single correct answer for home-based healthcare. It shows a different sequence. The physician did not go into the home first. Specimen collection did. Clinical care and health management were added on top of that. Home-based healthcare does not have to wait until the entire health system has fully matured.
About the Author
Sung-Ki Kim, Ph.D. in Social Welfare
Director, The Care Biz Lab
Chairperson, SE Empower Social Cooperative
Email: skkwelfare@gmail.com
References
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