QUEST DIAGNOSTICS INC

Continuous Quality Improvement

Our goal is to provide every patient and customer with services and products of superior quality. We strive to accomplish that through rigorous processes that we measure and seek to improve, and by using the Quest Management System, which provides best-in-class business performance tools to create and implement effective and sustainable quality processes. Our Quality and Regulatory Affairs organization continues to advance our commitment to operational excellence, regulatory integrity, and a culture of quality. Our Quality Program includes policies and procedures to document, measure and monitor the effectiveness of our laboratory operations in providing and improving quality and meeting applicable regulatory requirements. The Quality Program is designed so that the quality of laboratory services is monitored objectively and evaluated systematically to deliver superior quality care, identify opportunities to improve patient care and resolve identified problems.

Recently, we enhanced enterprise engagement through a unified Quality Policy and advanced our quality foundation by refining global processes, updating our Quality Framework, and deepening our cross-site collaboration. Additionally, we have a robust Supplier Quality Program designed to help us ensure we have a high-quality supplier network and to raise the bar of quality expectations across that network.

Operating Efficiency

We strive to enhance operational excellence and improve our efficiency across our value chain and operations, from the time that we first interact with a potential customer until the time we receive payment for our services. Improving our operations through standardization, optimization, digitization and automation can yield many benefits, including improving our quality and competitiveness, strengthening our foundation for growth, supporting our growth strategy, and increasing employee engagement, customer service and shareholder value. We are guided by a service dashboard that focuses throughout our operations on quality for consumers, healthcare providers and employees, including medical quality, on-time delivery, and employee safety.

Our cost excellence program, Invigorate, includes structured plans to drive savings and improve productivity across the value chain, including in such areas as patient services, logistics and laboratory operations, revenue services, information technology ("IT") and procurement. Our Invigorate program has consistently delivered 3% of annual cost savings and productivity improvements, which partly offset pressures from an inflationary environment, including labor and benefit cost increases, and reimbursement pressures. We are leveraging automation and AI to improve quality and productivity across our entire value chain, not just in the labo ratory. For example, we advanced our use of automation in front-end specimen processing and labeling in six of our labs, freeing more of our processors to focus on higher-order work. We also completed a successful pilot of our automated specimen processing and labeling platform at our Clifton, NJ lab. In 2025, we initiated or expanded our use of AI and automation in several areas, ranging from digital cytology, microbiology, parasitology and digital pathology. Other areas of focus include reducing denials and patient concessions, logistics route optimization to speed specimen transport, and enhancing the digital experience.

In February 2025, we committed to a multi-year project ("Project Nova") to modernize our "Order to Cash" business processes, which includes the related information technology infrastructure and underlying enabling technologies. We are partnering with Epic, a third-party licensor, to assist in the implementation of Project Nova. We expect to deliver value throughout the implementation of Project Nova, which is expected to be completed in 2031 to 2032, as it unlocks a variety of streamlined operational benefits, reduced technology-related operating costs, accelerated revenue opportunities, and improvements to the customer and patient experience.

Organized to Drive Growth and Value

We strive to strengthen our organizational capabilities to align around growth opportunities, coordinate business units for seamless execution and leverage our company-wide infrastructure to gain more capability, value and efficiency. The value creation side of our business includes product and commercial marketing and is organized by clinical franchise and focuses on customer solutions for the marketplace, including new test development and diagnostic insights. Our clinical franchises – Cardiometabolic, Endocrine, and Wellness, Drug Monitoring and Toxicology, Infectious Diseases and Immunology, Molecular Genomics and Oncology, Neurology, and Women’s and Reproductive Health – enable us to operate like a boutique laboratory while maintaining our scale advantages, and work with our research and development and commercial organizations to identify and deliver new and improved solutions. The value delivery side includes sales, laboratory operations, field operations, logistics and client services.

Assets and Capabilities that Deliver Value

We collaborate with partners and customers across the healthcare ecosystem to help create a healthier world. The table below outlines some of the assets and capabilities that make us an attractive partner.

Strong Relationships with Health Plans and Other Payers

Most of the services we perform are paid for by third-party payers, including large national health plans, regional and local health plans and government payers, which includes Medicare and Medicaid. Through these payers, we estimate that we have access to over 90% of insured lives in the United States. We work with payers to reduce the cost of care, improve the customer experience and drive better outcomes for patients. We can strengthen our relationships with health plans and increase the volume of our services for their members by focusing on driving value and providing strong value propositions for members and physicians. For example, we build information platforms to help health plans manage utilization and population health, keep laboratory testing in network and provide an alternative to high-cost labs. We also offer extended care services to help close gaps in care designed to be attractive to payers.

Medical and Scientific Expertise

We leverage our medical and scientific expertise and aspire to be a trusted authority in diagnostic medicine, provide insights and tools to support public and personal health, lead and facilitate scientific discussion and inspire innovation. Our medical and scientific experts regularly provide presentations, symposia and webinars regarding diagnostic testing and participate on scientific committees determining guidelines for diagnostic usage. They also publish research that demonstrates the clinical value and importance of diagnostic testing, including in connection with our research and development efforts, in peer-reviewed journals, textbooks and other publications. For over 30 years, the Company has published the Quest Diagnostics® Drug Testing Index, TM a series of reports on national workplace drug positivity trends based on the Company's employer workplace drug testing data, that is widely cited by employers, the federal government and the media to help identify and quantify drug abuse among the nation's workforce. The Company also publishes Quest Diagnostics® Health Trends,® scientific reports that provide insights into health topics, based on analysis of objective clinical laboratory data, to empower better patient care, population health management and public health policy. In 2025, we published a Health Trends® report showing that many oncologists feel they are seeing more patients with advanced cancers due to screening barriers, such as missed or delayed follow-up care or monitoring, and that imaging tests may not detect cancer recurrence early enough. Many of these oncologists believe that ctDNA MRD testing could reduce diagnosis delays in cancer recurrence.

We are a founding member, with other leading diagnostic laboratories outside the United States, of the Global Diagnostics Network TM, a strategic working group of diagnostic laboratories committed to unleashing and sharing local innovation to increase global access to diagnostic science, information and services and generating enhanced diagnostic insights to improve the delivery of global healthcare.

Health Information Technology Solutions and Information Assets

We have a history of providing leading IT for diagnostic information services, including for patients, physicians and healthcare organizations. We were the first national diagnostic information services provider to offer online patient appointment scheduling and a patient connectivity solution. Our MyQuest® patient healthcare portal, with more than 45 million registered users at year-end 2025, enables patients to manage healthcare and medical information for themselves and a circle of others, find a Quest Diagnostics location, schedule appointments, receive appointment reminders, assess whether their health plan is in-network and receive and archive their test results. Individuals can also use their smartphone or computer to order a consumer-initiated test from us at QuestHealth.com. Our connectivity platform enables providers to easily order tests and receive results from us from more than 1,000 electronic health records systems. We are expanding our use of digital and other technology tools to improve our customer experience for patients and providers.

We also have significant information assets and offer a robust portfolio of powerful analytics that inspire action and deliver value to our customers. We offer an array of solutions based on data insights, including retrospective analytics solutions for physicians, hospitals, health plans, pharmaceutical companies and public health organizations. We believe these solutions can tap the potential of large amounts of clinical information to: enhance the customer experience; deliver more precise, comprehensive solutions and actionable information; provide increased and interactive insights and analytics; foster greater adherence to clinical and reimbursement guidelines; and advance the development of precision medicine. We believe that the breadth and depth of our data, combined with our powerful analytics capabilities, enables us to take advantage of important data-based opportunities in diagnostics, and provides us a competitive advantage.

Innovation

We are a leading provider of innovation in diagnostic information services that help healthcare market participants care for their patients through better testing for predisposition, screening, monitoring, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment choices, and that can deliver high clinical value to the medical community and reduce the overall cost of healthcare. We develop and introduce new tests through our research and development operations. Our capabilities include discovery, technology development and clinical validation of diagnostic tests. We also partner with other developers of new technologies, services and tests to transfer their innovations to the marketplace, using our in-house expertise (e.g., strength in new service development and commercialization of testing services). These developers include large commercial manufacturers, the academic community, pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms, emerging medical technology companies, other laboratory companies and others that develop and commercialize novel diagnostics, pharmaceutical and device technologies. Given our expertise and broad U.S. network, we believe we are the distribution channel of choice for developers of new diagnostic information solutions. Our innovation strategy focuses on new services and solutions for unmet clinical needs that will improve patient care and outcomes as well as economic value for patients, health plans and other payers. In 2023 and 2025, certain diagnostic programs received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation, designed to address identified limitations in current diagnostic methodologies and unmet clinical needs.

Our research and development team includes leaders in a number of fields, including genomics, genetics and bioinformatics, as well as in disease states, such as oncology, neurology, cardiometabolic disease and other disorders. We are also well positioned to take advantage of advances in next generation sequencing to grow our business in cancer and other disease state testing. This includes inherited genetics, newborn screening, rare disease diagnosis, and solid tumor sequencing, such as to aid treatment selection and monitoring. We also maintain relationships with advisers and consultants who are leaders in key fields of science and medicine who advise us with our internal team of experts, complementing our expertise.

We endeavor to improve test processes, including through increased automation and AI. For example, we provide automated next generation genetic sequencing, which will enable genetic screening that is more precise, faster and at lower cost. In addition, we aim to develop holistic solutions responsive to challenges that healthcare providers and patients face, by developing solutions of tests, information and services focused on specific clinical challenges. We look to offer solutions from our large dataset and data analytics capabilities to help providers and health plans identify opportunities to optimize appropriate laboratory utilization, align clinical practice to medical guidelines, and inform patient-care decisions. We also look for innovations and solutions that are more convenient, less invasive and more cost effective than currently available options.

We seek innovation in the ways we bring solutions directly to customers to allow them to be more involved in and have more control over their health outcomes, and to improve the customer experience, including enhanced services and end-to-end solutions for convenience and support.

Artificial Intelligence

We have a long history of using advanced technologies to automate processes, improve customer service and productivity, generate insights from lab and other data, improve the customer experience, and stimulate innovation. Other areas of focus include reducing denials and patient concessions, and logistics route optimization to speed specimen transport. We use AI to help drive innovation and operational efficiency through improving the quality of our screening and diagnostic capabilities. We also continue to broaden our use of AI in customer service to help our representatives access answers more quickly, improving their effectiveness and service quality. In 2025, we announced a collaboration with Google to use Google Cloud's data analytics and generative AI to help us streamline our data management, improve data analytics, and personalize the experiences we deliver to patients, providers, and other customers.

We are committed to using AI in an ethical, responsible and compliant way. We have implemented a formal AI governance oversight committee and established multiple AI safeguards to minimize risks associated with AI, including, but not limited to, expanded security and privacy measures, increased user access controls, employee and other end user training and certification, and standard operating procedures. Our AI program has been designed to comply with applicable laws, regulations and AI frameworks, and we strategically partner with external AI experts as needed to ensure we remain informed about the latest technological advancements and best practices in the industry. Over time, we believe AI, including generative AI, will help us innovate and grow in a responsible manner while also enhancing customer and employee experiences and bring operating and cost efficiencies. We intend to be at the forefront of the innovative, responsible and secure use of AI in diagnostic information solutions.

A Commitment to Improving Health and Well-Being in the Communities We Serve

As part of our commitment to creating a healthier world, we work alongside the Quest Diagnostics Foundation to support community-led solutions that seek to improve health and well-being in the communities we serve. Our approach leverages donated diagnostic testing by Quest and emphasizes investments in nonprofit healthcare systems, safety net providers, and community-based organizations addressing social drivers of health that create barriers to care. We have invested approximately $53 million to community initiatives across the United States and Puerto Rico. These investments span a broad range of evidence-based strategies, including community workforce development, community health worker care coordination models, expanded access to diagnostic testing, wellness and screening events, and education programs that promote long-term health and prevention. As we look ahead, we will continue to invest in evidence-based, scalable practices that improve health in the communities we serve.