Laboratory Management
Laboratory management in today’s clinical lab industry is changing rapidly and facing entirely new challenges. One problem is the lack of upcoming younger lab managers, as the retirements of baby boomer pathologists, medical technologists and lab scientists are in the near future. These individuals make up the largest proportion of supervisors, managers, and lab administrators working in labs today.
As they retire, every clinical lab and pathology group needs to have the next generation of leaders ready to step up and assume responsibilities. But, across the lab industry, there are limited opportunities for every lab’s brightest up-and-comers to get the regular management development opportunities that are common among Fortune 500 companies. The Dark Intelligence Group has called for the establishment of a mentoring program to help overcome this problem.
At the same time, downward pressure on reimbursements and mounting competition have created an environment that requires much more effort for a medical lab to grow and thrive.
Legislation, including the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) of 2009 and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) of 2010, have placed significant demands on medical laboratories and healthcare providers to improve internal efficiency even while offering more services for less money. This pressure to “do more with less” is further compounded by the need to deliver increasingly personalized client service to retain and win clients.
With the era of fee-for-service medicine coming to a close, every clinical laboratory and anatomic pathology organization needs a strategy for getting paid, as new reimbursement models that support patient-centric care will make up a larger portion of lab revenues.
The challenge for every clinical laboratory manager is to understand how to evolve from a business model that is accession-centric or volume-centric to one that is patient-centric.
Many clinical laboratories today are developing data repositories to logically link all transactional and other information about a patient. These repositories allow physicians to see all relevant information, identify trends, and provide better care as a result, enabling labs to provide greater value to their customers, patients and payers, thus creating more value and becoming more patient-centric.
Surprisingly Low Price Paid for Miraca’s AP Lab Is a Warning
EVEN INTO THE MID 1980s, coal miners used canaries as an early-detection system for the presence of carbon monoxide and other toxic gases. In this way, canaries served as a sentinel species to save miners’ lives. Clinical laboratories and pathology groups don’t have a sentinel species to warn th…
Fla. Lab Sells to Labcorp, But Keeps Nursing Homes
CEO SUMMARY: Vista Clinical Diagnostics of Clermont, Fla., is betting big on the nursing home sector just when many labs serving nursing homes are worried about steep Medicare cuts coming Jan. 1. After selling its physician office referral testing, 35 patient service centers, and a mobile…
Tougher Times Ahead as Labs React to Fee Cuts
CEO SUMMARY: Just as Nero is reputed to have fiddled while Rome burned, officials at CMS seem to be doing their own fiddling as their planned deep price cuts to Medicare Part B lab tests could begin driving lab companies out of business. In recent weeks, the owners of two lab companies de…
Labs Begin Applying Lean to Cut Costs, Add Value
CEO SUMMARY: In more than 40 presentations by 55 speakers, two big themes dominated the 11th annual Lab Quality Confab in New Orleans last week. One theme is the urgent need to cut clinical laboratory costs. The second theme is the need for both clinical labs and anatomic pathology groups…
Finally, Abbott Buys Alere to Become #1 in POCT
CEO SUMMARY: After nearly two years of legal battles, Abbott Laboratories’ acquisition of Alere concluded on Oct. 3. Despite antitrust requirements to divest several of Alere’s diagnostic businesses to Quidel and Siemens Healthineers, the merger makes Abbott the world’s largest provider…
Positive Patient ID System Catches Patients Cheating on Toxicology Tests
CEO SUMMARY: The urine drug testing industry is challenged every day to detect the large number of patients trying to cheat on their drug tests. GenoTox Laboratories of Austin, Texas, developed a DNA-authentication method for urine samples that allows the lab to detect when patients have …
Invitae Investing Heavily To Expand Market Share
CEO SUMMARY: In its first five years of offering clinical tests, Invitae has outspent revenue by $330.7 million. Yet its executives are confident that their company is on a path to becoming one of the dominant players in the genetic testing sector. This profile of Invitae will help pathol…
LabCorp Spends $1.2 Billion to Acquire UK’s Chiltern
IT IS THE NEXT STEP to continue diversifying its business away from clinical laboratory testing. On July 31, Laboratory Corporation of America announced that it would acquire Chiltern, a specialty contract research organization in London and Wilmington, N.C. LabCorp…
Details Emerge About End of 31-Year Lab JV
CEO SUMMARY: Quest Diagnostics is no longer an equity partner in the CompuNet Clinical Laboratory joint venture, which has operated successfully since its founding in 1986. Typical of other lab JVs and inpatient lab management agreements that the hospital or health system partners do not rene…
Konica Minolta to Pay Up to $1 Billion for Ambry
CEO SUMMARY: It’s the second time in six years that a Japanese corporation paid a high price for a genetic testing company in the United States. Konica Minolta will purchase Ambry Genetics for $800 million at closing and $200 million upon hitting certain financial metrics. In 2011, Miraca H…
CURRENT ISSUE
Volume XXXII, No. 6 – April 21, 2025
Now that a federal judge has vacated the FDA’s LDT rule, The Dark Report analyzes the judgement and notes the various steps the FDA could take in response. Also, lab testing at pharmacies is proving to be less successful than was once anticipated.
See the full table of contentsHow Much Laboratory Business Intelligence Have You Missed?
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