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.
Kaiser Permanente NW Incorporates ISO-9000 In Regional Lab Design
CEO SUMMARY: After achieving its ISO-9000 certification, Kaiser Permanente Northwest’s laboratory division accomplished another distinction. It became the first lab in the nation to use the principles of ISO-9000 to design, build and operate a new, state-of-the-art, automated laboratory…
Online Distance Training Helps Labs Recruit & Retain More MTs
CEO SUMMARY: One surprise about online distance learning (ODL) programs for medical technologists (MT) is that even small hospital laboratories can use them to recruit and train more MTs. Across the United States, a growing number of labs are experiencing a shortage of MTs in their local …
Med Tech Training Via Long-Distance Programs
CEO SUMMARY: Students from as far away as Oregon and Hawaii are using the online distance training program at the Medical College of Georgia, located in Augusta, to get their Bachelor of Science degree and medical technologist certification. Because many regions do not have a local MT tra…
New Lab Management Directions Now Visible
CEO SUMMARY: Seat-of-the-pants laboratory management is on its way out, replaced by numbers-driven methods. Judging by the presentations given at this year’s Executive War College on Lab and Pathology Management, a growing number of laboratory administrators and pathologists are activel…
Beaumont Reference Labs Earns ISO-9000 for Outreach
MOTIVATED BY THE GOAL of improving all aspects of its laboratory outreach program, Beaumont Reference Laboratories (BRL) of Royal Oaks, Michigan recently earned its ISO-9000:2001 certification. “In the competitive market for lab testing, we wanted to raise the bar,” stated Joseph E. Skrisson, D…
LabCorp Starts Tinkering With DIANON Systems
CEO SUMMARY: For almost two decades, DIANON Systems supported one of the most successful sales and marketing programs in the public laboratory sector. However, despite its pre-acquisition statements that it would retain DIANON’s operational integrity, LabCorp has already begun to implem…
Labs In United Kingdom Study U.S., Canadian Labs
CEO SUMMARY: It was a groundbreaking first for both sides of the Atlantic. Senior pathologists and laboratory directors in the United Kingdom spent two days learning from their North American counterparts about the challenges and difficulties in laboratory consolidation and regionalizatio…
Dade Behring Primed To Become Public Firm
CEO SUMMARY: Dade Behring is executing an ambitious plan to restructure its finances and become a public company. To reduce its debt burden, Dade’s three owners are giving up their stock. Banks and bondholders will swap a portion of their debt for shares of stock in Dade. Once the finan…
Specialty Laboratories’ New CEO Reveals How His Company Is Changing
“You will see a more tightly focused Specialty Labs. We won’t try and do everything, rather we will do what is important for our customers.” —Douglas S. Harrington, M.D CEO SUMMARY: In recent months, several events roiled the market for hos…
Two Major Hospital Systems First to Join Leapfrog Group
EXPERTS CONSIDER THE DECISION of two major hospital systems to join the Leapfrog Group to be a significant boost to the group’s effort to improve patient safety. HCA, Inc. of Nashville, Tennessee and Promina Health System of Atlanta are the first …
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.
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