Jun 22, 2010 | Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology, News From Dark Daily
Lab-savvy lawyers tackle overlooked issues involving non-compete covenants, protection of client lists, and effective partnership agreements
Unbeknownst to many owners of clinical laboratories and pathology groups, several developments have created new risks for the most important business assets of these organizations. Experts involved in legal and financial consulting for laboratories advise their clients to take definitive steps to prevent direct loss or any significant erosion in the value of these valuable business assets.
Too often, laboratory owners and the pathologist-partners of group practices find the value of their business needlessly reduced because they failed to take simple—but necessary—actions to fully protect their assets. That is not surprising, because many of a laboratory’s highest-value assets are represented by contracts with employees and partners, agreements on trade secrets, non-compete covenants with executives and sales representatives, and even something as basic as employee handbooks.
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May 13, 2010 | Laboratory Pathology, Management & Operations, News From Dark Daily
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.
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Apr 20, 2010 | Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory Pathology
Pathologists find new Part A contract model creates added value for hospitals
Now pathologists have a new approach to reverse the trend for hospitals and health systems to pay even less for Part A pathology professional services. Innovative pathologists are crafting what they call a “performance-based Part A Support” agreement that adds new value for the hospital, along with additional compensation for the pathologists.
For pathologists, this is a major breakthrough in stabilizing and increasing hospital compensation for these important services. After all, for most of the past decade, many hospitals arbitrarily cut reimbursement for Part A pathology professional services—even as these hospitals held pathologists to ever-higher standards, including improved patient outcomes and more resources devoted to patient safety in the hospital’s clinical laboratory.
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Jan 19, 2010 | Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology
Experts predict a surge in the number of physicians using electronic medical record systems
By dangling as much as $20 billion in front of physicians to encourage their adoption of electronic medical record (EMR) systems during the next few years, Congress has created a new and expensive challenge for the nation’s clinical laboratories. That challenge is the need for every pathology laboratory to establish a high-function interface from its LIS to the office-based physician’s EMR.
According to one expert, the government’s “carrot and stick” strategy to reward doctors financially for adopting EMR’s, will soon force independent medical laboratories and hospital laboratory outreach programs to play catch up with LIS-EMR interfaces to maintain access to physician referrals and the revenue that accompanies these laboratory test specimens.
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