By Robert Michel, from the Volume XXV No. 11 – July 30, 2018 issue
Clinical labs and physicians can soon say goodbye to “meaningful use.” Federal officials are proposing a significant change to the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive program for certified EHRs that has been in existence since 2011. In a press release issued last spring, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a proposed rule.
By R. Lewis Dark, from the Volume XXV No. 6 – April 16, 2018 issue
MOST PATHOLOGISTS WOULD AGREE THAT PATIENTS AND THEIR PHYSICIANS have every right to expect a timely, accurate lab test result. Stated differently, patients and physicians implicitly trust that a pathology laboratory in the United States will not make errors in specimen processing (technical component) and diagnosis (professional component).
For these reasons, the recent federal Centers for
By R. Lewis Dark, from the Volume XXIV, No. 7 – May 15, 2017 issue
EXPERTS OFTEN PROCLAIM THAT THE U.S. HEALTHCARE SYSTEM is slow to change and slow to adopt the management approaches, operational innovations, and new technologies that other industries use.
One example is adoption of the quality management techniques that W. Edwards Deming and the Japanese developed by the 1970s. Today, these are described as Lean, Six Sigma,
By Joseph Burns, from the Volume XXIV, No. 5 – April 3, 2017 issue
CEO SUMMARY: Being accredited to this internationally recognized standard for quality and competence communicates to clients and prospective clients that one of the nation’s largest clinical labs is committed to the highest standards of quality. Clients already knew about that commitment but now have definitive proof, ARUP said. Also, lab administrators believed that gaining accreditation
By Robert Michel, from the Volume XXIII No. 17 – December 19, 2016 issue
CEO SUMMARY: Within THE DARK REPORT’S list of the Top 10 Lab Industry Stories for 2016 is one story of disruption that might have been one story of disruption about to happen. The disintegration of Theranos during 2016 is the big story about a self-proclaimed disruptor of the lab industry that finds itself struggling just
By Joseph Burns, from the Volume XXIII No. 13 – September 26, 2016 issue
CEO SUMMARY: It’s now official. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is the first children’s hospital to earn accreditation to ISO 15189 under the College of American Pathologists. What is more interesting, however, is how lab leadership used the quality management system of ISO 15189 to help lab staff to raise the quality of lab services.
By Joseph Burns, from the Volume XXIII No. 3 – February 29, 2016 issue
CEO SUMMARY: As healthcare transitions away from fee-for-service payment and adopts new models of reimbursement, every clinical lab will need to deliver more value with its lab testing services. At Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, the laboratory division has blazed a path of improving lab performance specifically to enable it to add value to
By Mary Van Doren, from the Volume XXIII No. 3 – February 29, 2016 issue
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Here’s a major accomplishment by the lab division of a nationally-recognized health system that has gone unreported until this DARK REPORT intelligence briefing. This article explains how using the quality management system of ISO 15189 and the Lean methodology in healthcare allow it to absorb shrinking lab budgets while improving quality, and, at the
By Robert Michel, from the Volume XXII NO. 17 - December 7, 2015 issue
Last week, a joint laboratory accreditation agreement was announced by AABB and the American Association for Laboratory Accreditation (A2LA). The two associations will now collaborate to allow labs to obtain three assessments under one effort, including AABB accreditation, ISO 15189 accreditation, and CLIA requirements. In their statement about the benefits of the new arrangement, the
By Mary Van Doren, from the Volume XXII NO. 5 - March 30, 2015 issue
Every lab organization should aspire to achieve the attributes of Level Four: Use Benchmarks to Achieve Best-in-Class because this is the level of performance where the lab is delivering optimal clinical value at highest quality and lowest cost. This is an effort in which the business skills of laboratory management come to the fore.
It is
