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.
Optimism & Opportunity at Executive War College
CEO SUMMARY: Instead of our annual review of key speakers as a source of emerging trends and common themes, this year we assess the attitudes, opinions, and activities of the pathologists, laboratory administrators, managers, and industry executives in attendance at the 15th Annu…
New Phlebotomist Policy Achieves Zero Error Rate
CEO SUMMARY: It’s not often when a hospital laboratory can use a patient safety project to achieve zero defects for more than one year. But that’s what happened at Desert View Hospital in Las Vegas, Nevada, when it went an entire year with no contaminants in draws for blood c…
Despite the Recession, Many Local Labs Thrive
CEO SUMMARY: Each year, the Executive War College offers useful perspectives on the current lab testing marketplace. This year’s gathering took place as the recession deepened. Yet that didn’t dampen the optimism and energy of 60 speakers and more than 450 attendees from 12 c…
Laboratory Industry Has “Elephant in the Room”
CEO SUMMARY: In almost every laboratory across the United States and in several countries around the globe, one much-discussed topic in recent weeks has been the Vitamin D testing program deficiencies at Quest Diagnostics Incorporated. Yet, even as rank and file laboratorians act…
Quest’s Deficiencies Trigger QA/QC Questions
CEO SUMMARY: Experts in laboratory QA/QC and proficiency testing (PT) are following the news that Quest Diagnostics admitted to an 18-month problem with lab test accuracy in its home brew Vitamin 25(OH) D assay. It is recognized as a major failure in the existing system of labora…
Two U.S. Labs Pursuing ISO 15189 Accreditation
CEO SUMMARY: In their first public interviews, the nation’s only two laboratories to seek ISO 15189:2007 accreditation share insights about the process, along with its challenges and benefits. Both laboratories are in the final stages of implementation and expect to earn accreditation b…
ISO 15189 Is the Goal at Avera McKennan Lab
CEO SUMMARY: Now entering its ninth month on the path to accreditation under ISO 15189:2007 Medical Laboratories, Avera McKennan’s lab recently completed its “gap analysis.” This important step prepared the laboratory for the pre-assessment and assessment steps that will result in a…
First U.S. Labs Nearing ISO:15189 Accreditation
CEO SUMMARY: Laboratories, hospitals, and other health-care providers in the United States will increasingly be required to adopt quality management systems (QMS) as part of their regular operational routine. This is consistent with trends in other developed countries. Several U.S. labora…
ISO 15189 Work Advances at Meeting in Vancouver
CEO SUMMARY: Laboring quietly out of the public eye, an international work team of professionals, including representatives from the CDC, the FDA, and global in vitro diagnostics (IVD) manufacturers, has spent the past 14 years developing an important series of quality and safety standard…
Hospital Lab Evolves Into A Consultative Resource
CEO SUMMARY: Every laboratory recognizes it has the knowledge and expertise to become more of a consultative resource to its referring physicians. At 248-bed J.T. Mather Hospital in Port Jefferson, New York, the laboratory director took advantage of administration’s interest in improving …
CURRENT ISSUE
Volume XXXII, No. 10 – July 14, 2025
This issue is strong on different flavors of enforcement that clinical laboratories, whether they want to or not, will need to contend with. Lab stakeholders provide insights that medical labs need to brace for more action to counter pending test reimbursement rate cuts under PAMA. Also, this issue provides the legal and regulatory landscape for clinical labs’ use of AI and how it evolves with the technology. AI is creating legal uncertainty for clinical labs, especially around data privacy and FDA oversight of AI tools in diagnostics.
See the full table of contentsHow Much Laboratory Business Intelligence Have You Missed?
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