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Commentary and Opinion by R. Lewis Dark

Removing Lab Players From the Chessboard

Commentary and Opinion by R. Lewis Dark / R. Lewis Dark

IN 1997-98, CEO Ken Freeman of Quest Diagnostics Incorporated made a keen insight about the commercial lab marketplace. At that time the three blood brothers—Laboratory Corporation of America, Quest Diagnostics, and SmithKline Beecham Clinical Laboratories (SBCL)—dominated the national market for physicians’ office testing. Freeman’s observation would be prophetic. He noted that, in any industry dominated […]

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Read “Waiver of Charges” for What It Is: FREE!

Commentary and Opinion by R. Lewis Dark / R. Lewis Dark

TODAY I AM AN OLD CURMUDGEON WHO IS IN HIGH DUDGEON. What’s got my dander up is the disturbing revelation in this issue of THE DARK REPORT about the willingness by some of our industry’s biggest companies to use “free testing” as a way to protect and build market share. (See pages 2-8.) This is

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Attack on Clinical Path Professional Payments

Commentary and Opinion by R. Lewis Dark / R. Lewis Dark

MANY PATHOLOGISTS WITH AN ECONOMIC INTEREST in clinical pathology professional component reimbursement have yet to fully appreciate the impact of an unfavorable decision rendered by a Florida appeals court recently. As you will read on page 5, an insurance company in Florida was actively sending letters to its patients and instructing them not to pay

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Boost for Consumer Choice in Healthcare

Commentary and Opinion by R. Lewis Dark / R. Lewis Dark

OVERLOOKED BY MOST LAB EXECUTIVES AND PATHOLOGISTS was a ruling made last month by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). It was a significant ruling, but neither the media nor many people in the United States understood its significance. As a result, this ruling got little news coverage. But for the laboratory industry and the entire

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Specialty Lab’s Woes Trigger Big Market Shift

Commentary and Opinion by R. Lewis Dark / R. Lewis Dark

IT’S THE UNPUBLICIZED STORY BEHIND THE STORY. Most of the laboratory industry knows that Specialty Laboratories, Inc. is the target of sanctions issued by both federal and state laboratory regulators. But the impact of this development has yet to be recognized across the industry. Published federal statutes and regulations do not clearly address Specialty Lab’s

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Big Fight is Brewing Over Lab Test Reimbursement

Commentary and Opinion by R. Lewis Dark / R. Lewis Dark

BY NOW, MOST LAB EXECUTIVES AND PATHOLOGISTS AGREE that Medicare Part B fees and reimbursement guidelines for lab testing have just about become de facto national standards. That’s because private payers increasingly use Medicare as the basis for building their own pricing and reimbursement guidelines. If you agree with me that this is now a

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Survivor: Story of the Nation’s Largest Lab Firm

Commentary and Opinion by R. Lewis Dark / R. Lewis Dark

TELEVISION’S “SURVIVOR” IS THE UNFOLDING STORY of how one person competes to outlast 16 fellow players in a remote outdoor setting. The winner of “Survivor” walks away with a $1 million prize. The show has proven to be popular and is now airing episodes of its fourth group of competitors, stuck on a tropical island

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California Is Lab Industry’s Bellwether Again

Commentary and Opinion by R. Lewis Dark / R. Lewis Dark

IT’S NO COINCIDENCE THAT two recent lab industry developments are centered around lab companies in California. Repeatedly that state has proven to be a valuable bellwether of lab industry trends for the nation. On the lab regulatory front, state officials from the California Department of Health Services (CDHS) have sanctioned Specialty Laboratories, Inc., based upon

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Clinical Decision Support Systems Arrive

Commentary and Opinion by R. Lewis Dark / R. Lewis Dark

FORWARD THINKERS IN CLINICAL LABORATORIES and anatomic pathology groups have always recognized the substantial, but as yet unharvested, potential that would accrue to the healthcare system were clinicians to make better use of laboratory testing. All of us know stories and anecdotes about how certain of these forward thinkers tried to get their hospital or

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Why Can’t Hospital Laboratories Collaborate?

Commentary and Opinion by R. Lewis Dark / R. Lewis Dark

MOST PEOPLE KNOWLEDGEABLE ABOUT THE INNER WORKINGS of the clinical laboratory industry generally agree that hospital laboratories possess inherent advantages over commercial laboratories—anytime a hospital lab outreach program is organized properly and marketed professionally. Certainly the managed care contracting success of Joint Venture Hospital Laboratories (JVHL) in Detroit and throughout the state of Michigan bears

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