direction before diagnosis

Diabetes Testing Centers™ (DTC) began with a focus on diabetes-related damage detection and has expanded into a broader chronic risk assessment platform for adult primary care, specialty clinics, MSOs, ACOs, and healthcare organizations. 

DTC was founded by former family practice owners who saw firsthand how often chronic risks are identified too late, after preventable complications have already begun. That experience, combined with enterprise healthcare leadership in diagnostics and diabetes, shaped DTC’s development of scalable, non-invasive, billable point-of-care programs. Today, with access to a national network of more than 20,000 independent practices, DTC helps CMS-ready and cash-pay providers identify patient risks during the same visit through rapid, objective chronic risk screeners and assessments.

Early Risk Signals

Most chronic diseases do not begin with a diagnosis. They often begin years earlier with subtle changes in how a patient feels, functions, or moves — changes that may not appear in labs and may never become documented concerns. Patients often notice these changes but explain them away as aging, stress, fatigue, or “just getting older.” They may not schedule a visit, mention them during an existing one, or follow up until the symptoms become impossible to ignore. By then, the underlying disease process may have been active for years.

This is the gap structured chronic risk detection is designed to close. Not by adding complexity to the clinical visit, but by creating a systematic mechanism that surfaces what patients are already experiencing at the moment they are already present in the care setting. No additional appointment. No separate referral. No waiting for the patient to decide their symptoms are worth reporting. Healthcare organizations that build detection into the front end of care stop relying on patient-initiated concern as the trigger for clinical action. They capture risk while the patient is in the room, document it while medical necessity is present, and create a pathway forward before the window for early intervention closes. The visit does not change. The clinical intelligence it produces does.

Go Beyond Blood Sugars

Early Testing Matters

The clinical case for earlier testing is not theoretical — it is measurable. Chronic conditions including diabetes, hypertension, peripheral neuropathy, cognitive decline, and cardiovascular disease each follow a predictable trajectory: a long subclinical phase during which damage accumulates silently, followed by a clinical threshold at which intervention becomes reactive rather than preventive. The difference in patient outcomes between detecting a condition during the subclinical phase versus after complications have emerged is significant. So is the difference in cost, complexity, and the range of treatment options still available.

Most primary care workflows are not structured to test during that earlier window. Patients present with a chief complaint. Providers respond to what is reported. What is not reported — early neuropathic changes, subtle cognitive shifts, vascular risk signals, behavioral health burden — is rarely captured because the intake process was not designed to surface it. Testing that could have redirected the clinical pathway simply does not happen.

DTC exists to change that equation. The programs, diagnostics, and workflows DTC brings into a practice are designed specifically to test earlier, within the visits that are already occurring, for the conditions that produce the greatest long-term harm when missed. Earlier testing does not require a different patient. It requires a more structured point of entry into the care that practice is already delivering.

The providers who benefit most are not those adding complexity to their practice. They are those who recognize that the clinical value was already there — in their existing patient panel, at their existing visit frequency — and simply needed a more structured pathway to surface it.

CMS-Ready and Cash-Ready