Preventive care: Rethinking early risk detection
How can Integrated Diagnostics help identify risk earlier and support better-informed decisions?
Prevention is taking on a greater role in healthcare. Across Europe and beyond, healthcare systems are looking for ways to identify risk earlier and intervene before disease progresses. National prevention programmes are expanding, primary care is taking on a greater role in early risk assessment, community diagnostic services are bringing diagnostics closer to patients, and dedicated preventive and longevity health services are creating new models for proactive care.
This shift is changing more than healthcare delivery. It is changing what clinicians need from diagnostics.
For decades, diagnostics have largely been used to confirm or exclude disease once symptoms appear. Prevention requires a different approach. It depends on recognising risk before disease develops, bringing together different sources of clinical information and supporting earlier, more informed decisions.
The need for this shift has never been greater.
Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), including cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and chronic respiratory diseases, remain one of the greatest challenges facing healthcare systems worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, they caused 43 million deaths globally in 2021, with cardiovascular disease remaining the leading cause of NCD deaths.¹
Europe faces the same challenge. The WHO Regional Office for Europe estimates that approximately 1.8 million deaths from NCDs each year are avoidable, either through effective prevention or through timely diagnosis and access to quality healthcare.²
These figures help explain why prevention is moving higher on the healthcare agenda. But recognising the need for prevention is only the first step.
The next question is how healthcare systems are redesigning care to make prevention possible.
How healthcare systems are putting prevention into practice
There is no single blueprint for preventive healthcare. Countries are redesigning prevention in different ways, reflecting their healthcare systems, funding models and population needs. While the approaches differ, they all share the same objective: identifying health risks earlier and enabling more proactive clinical decisions.
1. Population-based prevention
Many healthcare systems begin prevention long before patients develop symptoms. National programmes proactively identify people at increased risk and invite them for structured health assessments instead of waiting for disease to appear.
England's NHS Health Check programme is one of Europe's established examples. Adults aged 40 to 74 without certain pre-existing conditions are offered a cardiovascular health assessment every five years. The check is designed to assess cardiovascular health and identify increased risk of conditions including heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease and stroke.³
2. Prevention through primary care
For many people, prevention starts with their family physician.
Across OECD countries, primary care plays an important role in preventive care, early detection and the management of chronic conditions. As the first point of contact, strong primary healthcare can provide comprehensive and continuous care while supporting prevention and helping people manage their own health.⁴
In Spain, the IMPaCT Cohort provides an example of how primary care can contribute to a more preventive and predictive approach to health. Promoted by the Carlos III Health Institute (ISCIII) and coordinated through CIBER, the initiative aims to follow approximately 200,000 people over 20 years through a nationwide network of primary care centres. By combining questionnaires, physical measurements, biological samples and clinical data, the project aims to better understand the factors that influence the development of major diseases and contribute to the advancement of predictive medicine and prevention in Spain.⁵
Preventive care program from Spain
3. Community-based diagnostic services
Some healthcare systems are redesigning care by bringing diagnostics closer to patients.
England's Community Diagnostic Centre (CDC) programme is one of the best-known examples. Community Diagnostic Centres provide a broad range of diagnostic tests outside acute hospital settings, giving patients more convenient access to diagnostics. The model is designed to provide coordinated diagnostic testing in community settings and support more efficient diagnostic pathways.⁶
Rather than simply increasing diagnostic capacity, CDCs are also designed to optimise clinical pathways and improve how diagnostic services are organised and delivered.⁶
4. Dedicated preventive and longevity health services
Alongside public healthcare, specialised preventive and longevity health services represent another model of proactive care. These services typically focus on assessing health and risk before symptoms develop, with greater emphasis on prevention, long-term health and personalised care.
Unlike traditional care pathways that are often organised around a specific condition or clinical need, preventive and longevity services can offer broader health assessments within a dedicated preventive pathway.
Recent evidence on cardiovascular health checks suggests that structured health assessments can support the identification of people at increased cardiovascular risk and improve the detection of cardiovascular risk factors.⁷
While these services vary considerably in scope and organisation, they reflect a broader shift towards healthcare that seeks to understand and manage risk earlier, rather than waiting for disease to become established.
What all these models have in common
Although healthcare systems are adopting different approaches to prevention, they all face the same challenge: how to transform growing amounts of clinical information into meaningful clinical decisions.
Imagine a patient attending a preventive health assessment.
During a single consultation, clinicians may assess cardiovascular risk, vascular status, respiratory function and vital signs, alongside medical history, lifestyle factors and laboratory findings. Each provides a different perspective on the patient's health, but no single measurement tells the whole story.
This is where the concept of Integrated Diagnostics becomes increasingly relevant to preventive care. By bringing different measurements and clinical information together within the same workflow, healthcare professionals can build a more complete picture of individual risk and gain broader context for deciding on appropriate next steps.
This changes the role of diagnostics.
Traditional diagnostics are designed to confirm or exclude disease once symptoms appear. Preventive care asks a different question:
Who is at risk, and what can we do before disease develops?
Answering that question requires more than accurate individual measurements. It requires clinicians to connect findings from different diagnostic domains, recognise patterns and translate clinical information into meaningful decisions.
This approach is reflected in the 2021 European Society of Cardiology Guidelines on cardiovascular disease prevention, which place cardiovascular risk assessment at the centre of preventive decision-making and recommend considering individual characteristics, risk factors and overall cardiovascular risk when deciding on preventive interventions.⁸
Healthcare policy is evolving in the same direction. The World Health Organization's Global Strategy on Digital Health 2020–2027 promotes the development of more effective, equitable and people-centred health systems through digital transformation.⁹ The European Health Data Space (EHDS) establishes a common EU framework for electronic health data, including measures intended to improve access to health data and interoperability across electronic health record systems.¹⁰
Whether prevention takes place through national programmes, primary care, community diagnostic centres or dedicated preventive health services, every model depends on the same foundation: timely, reliable and clinically meaningful diagnostic information.
Healthcare has spent decades improving the accuracy of individual diagnostic tests.
The next challenge is making better use of the information those tests provide.
The future of preventive care will increasingly depend on how effectively healthcare systems connect diagnostic workflows, clinical data and individual measurements. By bringing these elements together, Integrated Diagnostics can help healthcare professionals build a more complete picture of patient risk, make better-informed decisions and support earlier intervention.
Because the future of prevention depends not only on what we measure, but on how we connect what we know.