QUEST DIAGNOSTICS INC

Our strategy aims to achieve two key goals: generate growth and optimize our operating efficiency. Our growth strategy focuses on continually developing solutions to meet the evolving needs of our customers. We help people make the best decisions to improve health by providing high quality, innovative, convenient and affordable diagnostic testing insights and services using our scale and extensive reach. We drive growth by:

•offering an industry-leading menu of testing and other services;

•collaborating with healthcare providers and partners to leverage our broad access;

•leveraging our data assets and services to improve population health and enable value-based care; and

•continuously improving our quality and efficiency by leveraging the Quest Management System and by embracing innovative technologies, such as automation and artificial intelligence ("AI").

Our growth strategy is focused on our primary customer channels – physicians, hospitals, patients and consumers – supported by Advanced Diagnostics™ (defined below), strategic acquisitions, and continuous quality improvement.

Physicians

We serve approximately half the physicians in the United States each year. We serve virtually all types of physicians from primary care physicians and internists to specialists, including rheumatologists, cardiologists, neurologists, and obstetricians/gynecologists. We also serve physicians associated with accountable care organizations (“ACOs”), and Federally Qualified Health Centers (“FQHCs”). Physicians determine which laboratory to recommend or use based on a variety of factors, but we believe that we provide the most attractive service offering in the industry, including a comprehensive test menu, innovative test offerings, a positive customer experience, deep medical and scientific expertise, high quality, leading access and distribution, and data-powered integrated information-technology solutions. Large physician practices value our ability to standardize services on a national or regional scale.

Hospitals

We believe that the market challenges faced by hospitals, including continued consolidation, price transparency, cost and utilization pressure, evolving healthcare payment models, capital needs, changing technology and limited resources, provide us with an opportunity to partner with them as they consider more effective ways to implement their laboratory testing strategy and drive demand for our expertise and services.

We serve approximately half the hospitals in the United States each year in many ways, including:

•Serving as a hospital lab’s laboratory. In 2025, we generated approximately $1.2 billion in revenue from “reference testing,” where we perform testing that hospitals do not perform in their own in-hospital labs.

•Helping hospitals operate their labs more efficiently. In 2025, our Collaborative Lab Solutions (formerly known as Professional Laboratory Services) offering generated approximately $800 million in revenues and management fees supporting hospitals in the operation of their own labs. Our key Collaborative Lab Solutions offerings include lab management outsourcing, test menu optimization and spend consolidation, supply chain management, and providing advanced data solutions.

•Acquiring outreach lab operations from hospitals. Quest looks for opportunities to acquire assets of outreach lab operations from hospitals whose in-house labs have expanded from supporting in-patients to supporting out-patients and ambulatory patients who see physicians that may or may not be employed or otherwise affiliated with the hospitals.

We also have joint venture arrangements with leading hospitals and health systems. These joint venture arrangements, which provide diagnostic information services for affiliated and nonaffiliated hospitals and clinicians and other local healthcare providers, serve as our principal facilities in their service areas. Typically, we have either a majority ownership interest in, or day-to-day management responsibilities for, our joint venture relationships.

Patients and Consumers

We have taken steps to be recognized as the consumer-friendly provider of choice of diagnostic information services. Patients increasingly expect their healthcare experiences to be consumer-centric, which includes being more transparent, accessible and convenient. Most patients have a choice when selecting a diagnostic testing provider, and our goal is to provide leading services in conveniently located patient service centers that can provide a comprehensive suite of testing services. Many of our 2,400 patient service centers are located inside large retail stores or in convenient retail settings. We continue to enhance our operations to improve the patient experience in these locations. For example, our "Schedule at Check In" capability encourages patients to make appointments, including through mobile appointment scheduling, and our self-serve kiosks provide wait-time estimates for walk-in and standby patients and offer many language options. These improvements allow us to better manage demand and productivity and have reduced average wait times in the patient service centers. We also provide mobile phlebotomy services in many parts of the United States so patients who prefer an in-home blood draw may access our services for a fee.

We work to improve our digital experience, from making it easier for patients and consumers to locate a patient service center and receive results on our MyQuest® patient healthcare portal to enabling providers to access their patients’ test result reports. We are also integrating the patient payment process into the digital customer experience, which improves the patient experience, provides greater pricing transparency, helps our patient concession rate and reduces demands on phlebotomists.

As consumers increasingly seek more involvement and control over their health and wellness, we aim to meet them where they are. Our QuestHealth.com platform empowers health- and wellness-minded consumers to purchase tests and panels without the need to schedule an appointment and visit a doctor’s office. Through this platform, we enable access to third-party physician review to place test orders and be available to consult with the consumer via a teleconsult about their test results. We offer over 150 tests, including comprehensive wellness panels with up to 85 key health indicators, tests to monitor certain chronic conditions, and tests for students and workers in healthcare, education and other occupations that require them. Our cash pay price for consumers is convenient for those who wish to establish their baseline wellness status, monitor themselves for chronic medical conditions, and are interested in their wellness throughout relevant time periods, such as athletes preparing for events. We are also powering the testing offered by leading health, wellness, and wearable brands, where we provide the underlying testing services for their consumer health service offerings. Our multi-channel consumer offerings reflect our belief that our consumer focus positions us to capture expanding opportunities presented by the growth of consumer-initiated testing and of the demand for expanded access to health and wellness services.

We continually evaluate technologies with the potential to improve choice and convenience for patients and consumers. We offer patients and consumers experiencing symptoms of several common genital tract infections, including sexually transmitted infections, the option to self-collect a swab specimen, aimed at increasing privacy, convenience and speed of testing. In 2025, we introduced specimen self-collection in clinical settings for human papillomavirus (HPV) screening to help identify women at risk for developing cervical cancer, broadening access to a vital preventative care test. We also provide opportunities for companies with telehealth and retail business models to rebrand our testing and utilize our patient service centers to provide access.

Other Customer Channels

Our other customer channels include health plans, employers, new and emerging retail healthcare providers, government agencies, pharmaceutical companies and other commercial clinical laboratories, which are described in more detail under “ – Customer Channels.” While we principally focus on the U.S. market, we serve customers globally and have a growing business that provides advanced reference testing to laboratory providers in other countries. For more information about our operations, see “ – Business Operations.”

Advanced Diagnostics

We support the needs of all our customers with a focus on Advanced Diagnostics™. Clinical laboratory testing can be characterized as routine, non-routine or advanced. Non-routine tests (commonly referred to as esoteric) are tests that may require professional “hands-on” attention from highly-skilled technical personnel, generally require more sophisticated data analysis, technology, equipment or materials, may be performed less frequently than routine tests and may be reimbursed at higher levels than routine tests. We refer to certain non-routine, highly innovative and specialized tests that we offer as Advanced Diagnostics™.

We are a leading provider of Advanced Diagnostics™ and provide an array of offerings, including certain procedures in the areas of molecular diagnostics (including next-generation sequencing), oncology, neurology, companion diagnostics and non-invasive pre-natal and other germline genetic testing. In 2025, certain Advanced Diagnostics™ test offerings within five clinical areas – oncology, cardiometabolic and endocrine, brain health, autoimmune, women’s health and genetics – generated over $1 billion in revenues on double-digit revenue growth.

Our investments in our Advanced Diagnostics™ offerings enhance our innovation capabilities and strengthen our service offering, making our Advanced Diagnostics™ offerings more attractive and accessible to physicians and hospitals. We are also applying the capabilities gained by these efforts to support other areas where we can make a meaningful difference in healthcare, including offerings to pharmaceutical companies and consumers.

We are also particularly focused on the rapidly growing areas of monitoring recurrence and therapy effectiveness. In 2023, we acquired Haystack Oncology, Inc. ("Haystack Oncology") a cancer testing company that has developed a highly sensitive testing technology for detecting minimal-residual disease (“MRD”) by circulating tumor DNA due to residual or recurring cancer. Circulating tumor DNA ("ctDNA") refers to DNA fragments shed by a solid tumor, such as colorectal or breast cancer, into the blood stream. We believe this acquisition strengthens our comprehensive oncology portfolio by positioning us well to compete in the higher-growth clinical area of ctDNA solid-tumor MRD testing. Since the acquisition, several organizations have used the Haystack Oncology MRD test in research, including for clinical trials. In 2025, we received a breakthrough device designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) for our Haystack Oncology MRD test for patients with an early stage colorectal cancer diagnosis. This milestone reinforces the high caliber of our cancer monitoring innovation by validating the use of the Haystack Oncology MRD test and opens avenues for developing companion diagnostics. We continue to make progress towards commercialization by expanding access. In 2025, we commenced separate trials with Mass General Brigham and Rutgers Cancer Institute to further research Haystack Oncology MRD test's clinical utility as a guide in making post-operative therapy decisions.

We also continue to focus on neurology. In 2023, we launched our QUEST AD-Detect® test portfolio for assessing Alzheimer's disease risk using blood specimens, as opposed to testing by more costly or invasive methods, such as testing of cerebral spinal fluid by lumbar puncture. We continue to publish evidence on our AD-Detect test, including a study in a publication of the American Academy of Neurology that found two of our innovative panels provide confirmatory accuracy for aiding Alzheimer's diagnosis. We continue to add new testing to this suite of services for assessing the risk of Alzheimer's Disease, including isoform and plasma testing for patients with cognitive impairment. In addition, our Autoimmune ANAlyzeR™ service helps primary care physicians comprehensively screen for autoimmune disorders to accelerate diagnosis and care by specialists.

Acquisitions and Capital Deployment

Our strategy includes generating growth through value-creating, strategically aligned acquisitions using disciplined investment criteria. We screen potential acquisitions using guidelines that assess strategic fit and financial considerations, including value creation, return on invested capital and impact on our earnings. We endeavor to grow revenues each year by 1-2% through acquisitions. We will continue to invest in our business in a disciplined manner, including focusing on enhancing our solid foundation of strategic assets and capabilities. In 2025, we acquired select clinical testing and dialysis-related water testing assets of Fresenius Medical Care's wholly-owned Spectra Laboratories, a leading provider of renal-specific laboratory testing services in the United States. We also entered into a joint venture with Corewell Health, a leading health system in Michigan, which will perform laboratory testing in the state of Michigan via a new laboratory facility. Equity ownership of the joint venture is shared 51% by Quest and 49% by Corewell Health. In addition, we provide the full complement of our Collaborative Lab Solutions offering for Corewell Health.

Our significant acquisitions in each of the last three years are further discussed in Note 6 to the audited consolidated financial statements (Part II, Item 8 of this Report).

Acquisitions are part of our disciplined capital deployment framework, which also includes investment in our business, dividends and share repurchases and is grounded in maintaining an investment grade credit rating. We expect to return a majority of our free cash flow to stockholders through a combination of dividends and share repurchases over time. Consistent with that expectation, in February 2026, we announced that we increased our quarterly common stock cash dividend by approximately 7.5%, from $0.80 per common share to $0.86 per common share. This represents our 15 th increase in the dividend since the beginning of 2012. For many years, we have maintained a common stock repurchase program. Since the beginning of 2012, we have returned approximately $8.1 billion to stockholders through repurchases of our common stock.