Oct 6, 2014 | Laboratory News, Laboratory Operations, Laboratory Pathology, Management & Operations
The challenge facing medical lab managers and pathologists is to intelligently cut costs in their labs without laying off med techs, histotechs, and other lab scientists
By any measure, this year’s budget season is a tough one for the nation’s clinical laboratories and pathology groups. Most labs are scrambling to adjust to reduced reimbursement and directives from their parent hospitals and health systems to shrink their lab budgets for 2015.
It’s why smart cost-cutting tops the list of challenges at all medical laboratory managers and pathologists. Lab leaders need effective approaches to trim spending in their lab without the need to lay off skilled medical technologists and other experienced lab scientists. (more…)
Oct 5, 2011 | Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News, News From Dark Daily
DATELINE: Toronto, Ontario, Canada—This week, clinical laboratory and pathology leaders from across Canada gathered here at the fifth Executive Edge conference to assess the state of medical laboratory testing in Canada’s different provinces. One message in the provocative sessions was clear and consistent; ever more volumes of lab testing will continue to hit clinical laboratories, even as provincial health authorities squeeze lab testing budgets in coming years.
It means that, going forward, clinical laboratories in Canada will be asked to perform growing numbers of tests without a comparable increase in lab budgets or reimbursements. Most speakers recognized this primary trend. In her presentation, Tammy Hofer, Vice President of Laboratory Services for the Alberta Health System, observed that the number of medical laboratory tests performed across the province is increasing at approximately 6% per year. In the province, there are 133 clinical laboratories and they perform approximately 60 million tests per year for Alberta’s population, which currently numbers 3.7 million people.
Another speaker during Monday’s sessions that tackled the subject of growing utilization of clinical laboratory testing was James Tucker, Principal of the Boston Consulting Group. Tucker is based in Toronto. He described the medical laboratory testing industry as a “burning platform” because the demand for lab testing will continue to outpace payment and funding paid to the labs which perform this testing.
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