Declining In-Patient Admission Rates Blamed on High-Deductible Health Plans; Could Impact Hospital-Based Medical Laboratories

Clinical laboratories may want to offset plunging patient lab specimens by increasing outreach business Hospital admissions are in decline across the country and the trend is being blamed in part on the rising use of high-deductible health plans (HDHP). The implications for hospital-based clinical laboratories is that lower in-patient totals reduce the flow of patient lab specimens as well. This situation may encourage some hospital and health-system labs to increase their lab outreach...

Clinical Laboratories and Pathology Groups May See Fewer Fee-For-Service Payments as More Hospitals and Health Systems Become Self-Insured

As national health insurers push more risk to hospital systems and medical groups, many hospital administrators become more interested in establishing their own health insurance companies New modes of provider reimbursement—such as bundled payments and budgeted payments—are motivating hospitals and health systems to reconsider their existing relationships with health insurers. Hospital administrators want to control the dollars they save by improving patient care, instead of allowing insurance...

Some Hospitals and Health Systems Get Bigger in Bid to Increase Efficiency and Profit Margins

Meanwhile, financial pressures mean smaller budgets for hospital laboratories When it comes to multi-hospital health systems, the biggest are getting bigger. But many health systems are not covering their costs. These were the findings from a recent annual survey of health systems by Modern Healthcare magazine. It confirms what pathologists and clinical laboratory directors see in many regional markets. As we wrote in Dark Daily on June 29, three factors are driving this growth trend: federal...

ECRI Publishes List of Top Ten Opportunities for Hospitals to Cut Costs

Clinical laboratories can play a role in two of these ten cost-cutting opportunities Everyone in healthcare expects significant across-the-board cuts to reimbursement as healthcare reform moves forward. High profile targets for cost-cutting are imaging technologies and physician preference items (PPIs), which include expensive supplies and implant products, including stents, wires, pacemakers, and knee/hip replacement prosthetics. Hospitals and health systems, in recognition of this major...

Informing Uninsured about Health Coverage Removes Big Barrier

As many as one-third of the nation’s uninsured qualify for public health programs and the answer to getting them insured may be as simple as educating these individuals about which health insurance programs are available to them! That should be big news for hospitals, health systems, and clinical laboratories that spend millions of dollars annually on uncompensated care for uninsured individuals each year. About 34% of uninsured individuals qualify for public health programs but are not...
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