HHS Office of Inspector General Report Finds ‘Steep Decreases’ in Medicare Beneficiaries Receiving Clinical Laboratory Testing During COVID-19 Pandemic’s Early Months

OIG warns that without adequate clinical laboratory testing healthcare organizations could see more deaths and increased spending Clinical laboratory leaders and pathologists know that lab test volume decreased dramatically during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. That was primarily because community lockdowns stopped people from seeing their doctors for the standard range of chronic health conditions, many of which require clinical laboratory tests for diagnosis and chronic disease...

Media Reporting Shows Some Clinical Laboratories Charge Significantly Higher than Average Prices for COVID-19 Tests—and It Is Perfectly Legal

When people receive COVID-19 testing at an out-of-network facility, federal law requires insurers to pay that clinical laboratory’s posted ‘cash price’ when negotiated prices have not previously been established In the latest example that some COVID-19 testing companies are charging significantly higher prices than others, The New York Times (NYT) recently reported that one COVID lab company with “more than a dozen testing sites” throughout the US was charging $380 for a COVID-19 rapid test...

Improvements to Fitness Wearables Help Stream Data from Consumers’ Homes to EHRs and Clinical Pathology Laboratories

As technologies used by fitness wearables mature, medical laboratories will want to develop ways to access and process the flood of data that will become available Point-of-care testing and remote patient monitoring are two technologies that could be disruptive to the clinical laboratory industry, particularly if use of these devices was to reduce the volume of patient specimen that are referred to the nation’s large, centralized medical laboratories. This is one reason why savvy pathologists...

Innovative California NPR Project Takes on Healthcare Pricing Transparency

NPR stations in San Francisco and Los Angeles crowdsourced healthcare cost data from listeners to reveal arbitrary pricing of medical services Over the past two years, Dark Daily has published a number of stories dealing with price transparency, or lack of it, most of which involved government agencies or nonprofits concerned about the high cost of healthcare services. This latest effort to shine a light on healthcare pricing, however, comes from National Public Radio (NPR). San Francisco’s...

Aetna, Humana, and UnitedHealth Agree to Share Data with HCCI to Give Consumers a Free, Comprehensive Source for Comparing Healthcare Prices and Quality

Scheduled to launch in early 2015, the Health Care Cost Institute’s free online tool will give consumers access to data on provider prices and quality It’s a significant sign of the times when three of the nation’s biggest health insurance companies agree to share data on healthcare prices and utilization specifically so that consumers can access this information. This will advance price transparency. It will also put more pressure on clinical laboratories to make it easy for consumers to see...
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