Rapid Cost Increases for Blood Products Cause Clinical Pathology Labs to Seek Solutions
Innovative hospital labs are creating collaborative project teams to help clinicians improve their utilization of blood products
If there is a guaranteed budget buster for clinical pathology laboratories in the United States, it is the steady and rapid growth in the cost of blood products. Some hospital laboratories report that the basic cost of blood products has doubled in recent years!
For this reason, transfusion medicine and blood banking functions are now a high-profile target for cost-cutting and aggressive management by pathologists and clinical laboratory managers. “The issues are familiar to all hospital laboratories,” stated Timothy Hannon, M.D., MBA , who is an anesthesiologist and President of Strategic Healthcare Group, LLC, in Indianapolis, Indiana. “The dramatic upward spiral of price increases for blood products in recent years is a major problem for hospital laboratories.
