News, Analysis, Trends, Management Innovations for
Clinical Laboratories and Pathology Groups

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News, Analysis, Trends, Management Innovations for
Clinical Laboratories and Pathology Groups

Hosted by Robert Michel
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Best Buy Health and Atrium Health Collaborate on a Hospital-at-Home Program, Leveraging the Electronics Retailer’s ‘Specially Trained’ Geek Squad, Omnichannel Expertise

Hospital-at-home programs like that of Atrium Health are a trend that may create new opportunities for local clinical laboratories to support physicians treating patients in the comfort of their own homes

Here is a deal that shows the hospital-at-home (HaH) movement is gaining momentum, a trend that clinical laboratories need to recognize for the opportunities it represents. Best Buy Health is partnering with 40-hospital Atrium Health in an HaH program that the healthcare system plans to scale nationally.

This newly-announced collaboration means that Charlotte, North Carolina-based Atrium Health—as partner—may include the hospitals and providers that are part of the 26-hospital Advocate Aurora Health system (now known as Advocate Health), a non-profit healthcare system that Atrium merged with in December of 2022. Providers and hospitals from North/South Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio all could be participating in the new HaH venture.

This latest partnership between a retail giant and healthcare network demonstrates how innovation is working its way into the US healthcare system via companies not traditionally involved in direct patient care. These two organizations see an opportunity to combine their strengths to “enhance the patient experience of receiving hospital-level care at home,” according to a Best Buy news release.

Rasu Shrestha, MD

“This is the coming together of technology and empathy,” said Rasu Shrestha, MD (above), Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation and Commercialization Officer at Advocate Health, in a press release.  “We’re able to leverage the power of social workers, paramedics, nurses and physicians, but also technology to take care of the patients in their homes. We can bring forward things like remote patient monitoring and sophisticated wearable devices that capture their vital signs and combine it with the human touch—bringing it directly into our patients’ homes.” Clinical laboratories that support providers in the states Advocate Health serves may want to contact Best Buy Health. (Photo copyright: Advocate Health.)

Dispatching Geek Squads to Support Telehealth in Patients’ Homes

Best Buy Health brings to its collaboration with Atrium Health expertise in omnichannel business strategies, supply chain, and a platform to enable telehealth connectivity between patients and providers, as well as deploying specially trained Geek Squad agents for in-home support, according to an Atrium Health press release.

“With Atrium Health, we want to help enable healthcare at home for everyone. It’s getting the devices to the home when Atrium Health and the patient needs them,” said Deborah Di Sanzo, President of Best Buy Health.

Atrium Health sees Best Buy Health as a partner that can grow its program while addressing complex in-home technology that can be “tricky” to operate, Retail Dive reported.

“This transition that happens from discharging a patient from a hospital to the void of their home is the dark side of the moon: it’s disconnected, confusing, expensive. What we’ve been doing in the past is working through our hospital-at-home program and putting together a lot of these devices,” Rasu Shrestha, MD, Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation and Commercialization Officer at Advocate Health, told Fierce Healthcare.

“By working with Best Buy Health, we’re developing the seamless connected care experience and an opportunity to truly scale this,” he added.

Geek Squad

Supporting hospital-at-home services in collaboration with Atrium Health will be a new role for at least some members of the Geek Squad. “They won’t necessarily be the same team that’s doing your home theater. They will be Geek Squad agents specially trained in health to deliver specific services in the home,” said Deborah Di Sanzo, President of Best Buy Health. (Photo copyright: Best Buy.)

Best Buy’s Healthcare Acquisitions and Growth in Hospital-at-Home Programs 

In making its commitment to healthcare, Best Buy Health recently acquired companies in remote patient monitoring, medical alert services, and telehealth.

The electronics retailer’s acquisitions, according to Fierce Healthcare, include:

  • GreatCall (now known as Lively), maker of health and safety products, in 2018.
  • Critical Signal Technologies, developer of remote monitoring technologies, in 2019.
  • TytoCare, a telehealth device company, in 2019.
  • Current Health, a remote monitoring care-at-home platform, in 2021.

While Best Buy was busy acquiring healthcare companies, more HaH programs popped up across the US due in part to rising inpatient costs and providers’ need to be more efficient and resourceful.

Atrium Health started its Hospital-at-Home program in March 2020 as a way to care for COVID-19 patients. The HaH program now serves people with:

According to Healthcare Dive, Shrestha claimed Atrium’s HaH program “has served more than 6,300 patients and freed 25,000 hospital bed days since it launched in March 2020,” and produced clinical outcomes that were “the same or better” when compared to the health systems’ own hospitals, and with higher patient satisfaction scores.

“We anticipate the partnership will combine Atrium Health operational and clinical expertise with Best Buy Health’s technical and logistical expertise to allow us to scale the program to 100 patients at a time and beyond within our market,” Shrestha told Healthcare Dive. “When you put that into context, this would be the equivalent of having an additional mid-sized hospital and have a real impact on capacity in our bricks-and-mortar facilities.”

Taking Atrium’s HaH Program Nationwide

According to federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services predictions, healthcare spending will reach $6.8 trillion by 2030. This might explain why Best Buy increased its investment in healthcare at the same time its sales declined 9.3% in the fourth quarter of 2022 amid softening consumer demand for electronics, Reuters reported.

And, according to Forbes, though financial terms on the Best Buy/Atrium Health partnership were not released, additional investments are planned to “scale [Atrium’s HaH program] beyond the system.”

“We combine our omnichannel, Geek Squad, caring centers, and Current Health services to enable care,” Di Sanzo told Forbes. “At scale, no other company has the holistic combination of resources that when combined, will change the lives of consumers and enable them to heal right in their own home surrounding by the people and things they love the most. Those strengths, combined with Atrium Health’s extensive clinical expertise and deep experience leading in virtual care, will help us improve and enable care in the home for everyone.”

Clinical Laboratory Testing at Home

Clearly there are opportunities for clinical laboratories to support providers who treat patients in their homes. Lab leaders may want to reach out to colleagues who are planning HaH programs in partnership with Best Buy Health, Atrium Health, or other companies around the nation launching similar hospital-at-home programs.

As medical laboratories address staffing challenges, HaH strategies for performing blood tests and other diagnostics on patients in their homes could lead to important new revenue.   

—Donna Marie Pocius

Related Information:

Atrium Health and Best Buy Health Partner to Improve Experience When Receiving Care at Home

Atrium Health and Best Buy Health Partner to Enhance Hospital-at-Home Experience

Atrium, Best Buy Partner to Co-Develop Hospital-at-Home Programming

Hospital-at-Home Steps Out of the COVID-Era Through New Atrium Health, Best Buy Partnership

Best Buy Pushes Deeper into Healthcare with Hospital-at-Home Partnership

Atrium Health, Best Buy Ink Hospital-at-Home Deal

Best Buy, Walmart, Other Major US Retailers Tout Health Services

CMS Office of the Actuary Releases 2021-2030 Projections National Health Expenditures

Orlando Health’s New Hospital-in-the-Home Program Brings Quality Healthcare to Patients in the Comfort of Their Homes

Oregon Health and Science University Announces Program to Provide Patients with Hospital-Level Care in the Comfort of Their Home

Where Are the Patients? Hospitals and Clinical Laboratories Wonder When Routine Surgeries, Procedures, and Testing Can Be Restarted Once the COVID-19 Outbreak Eases

Even as some states lift stay-at-home orders, clinical laboratories and pathology groups face uncertainty about how quickly routine daily test referrals will return to normal, pre-pandemic levels

Although strokes and heart attacks do not take vacations, a large and growing number of patients with serious health issues who—in normal times—would require immediate attention are not contacting providers to get needed care. Instead, they are avoiding hospital emergency rooms and clinical laboratories for fear they’ll contract the COVID-19 coronavirus.

Starting in early March, hospitals nationwide suspended elective surgeries and procedures and reduced non-COVID-19 inpatient care to make beds available for the predicted on-rush of COVID-19 patients. However, in parts of the country, the predicted high demand for hospital beds and ventilators failed to materialize. Additionally, due to shelter-in-place orders, patients in many states postponed routine office visits with their primary care physicians.

The collective collapse in the number of elective services provided by hospitals, and the fall-off in patients visiting their doctors, is crushing the financial stability of the nation’s clinical laboratory industry.

In, “From Mid-March, Labs Saw Big Drop in Revenue,” Dark Daily’s sister publication, The Dark Report (TDR) reported on the revenue challenges facing clinical pathology groups and clinical laboratories. Kyle Fetter, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Diagnostic Services at XIFIN, a revenue cycle management company, told TDR that starting in the third week of March, labs suffered a steep decline in routine testing. By the end of March, that fall-off in revenue ranged from 44% for some AP specimens to 70% to 80% for some specialty AP work. During these same weeks, XIFIN’s data showed clinical labs experienced a drop in routine testing volume of 58%, hospital outreach testing declined by 61%, and molecular lab volume went down by 52%.

Using data from multiple sources, The Dark Report estimates that—compared to pre-pandemic levels—the clinical laboratory profession lost almost $900 million in revenue each week—or about $5.2 billion as of April 26. (See Dark Daily, “COVID-19 Triggers a Cash Flow Crash at Clinical Labs Totaling US $5.2 Billion in Past Seven Weeks; Many Labs Are at Brink of Financial Collapse,” May 4, 2020.)

Can Clinical Laboratories Hang on Financially Until COVID-19 Goes Away?

Though most states have not met the nonbinding criteria recommended by the Trump administration for reopening, nearly 40 governors in early May began loosening stay-at-home orders, reported CNN, including allowing elective medical procedures to resume.

Patients may make up for lost time by returning to doctors’ offices for medical laboratory tests and other COVID-19-delayed procedures, and as this happens, clinical laboratories may experience a surge in routine test orders from doctors’ offices and hospital admissions once stay-at-home orders are lifted and fear of COVID-19 has passed.

According to an article published on Axios, a survey of 163 physicians conducted by SVB Leerink—an investment firm that specializes in healthcare and life sciences—found that “roughly three out of four doctors believe patient appointments will resume to normal, pre-coronavirus levels, no earlier than July, and 45% expect a rebound to occur sometime between July and September.” If so, the financial squeeze facing clinical laboratories, pathology groups, and other medical and dental professionals may continue to loosen.

Christopher Freer, DO, an emergency physician at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx and Director of Emergency Medicine at RWJ Barnabas Health
Christopher Freer, DO (above), an emergency physician at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx and Director of Emergency Medicine at RWJBarnabas Health, told CNBC that emergency departments are seeing patients with severe issues, such as stroke and appendicitis, but that those with milder symptoms appear to be staying away. “Even with coronavirus, we still have healthy people who get an illness and need to go to the emergency room,” he said. “Heart attacks don’t stop.” (Photo copyright: USA Today.)

Hospital Finances Are Being Particularly Stressed by Loss of Patients

The impact of stay-at-home orders on hospital systems, in particular, has been dramatic. CNBC reported that RWJBarnabas Health, an 1l-hospital 22-laboratory health system in New Jersey that has 11 emergency departments, totaled just 180 emergency room visits per day during a mid-April weekend, a sharp decline from their 280-per-day-average.

A recent Washington Post article paints an even bleaker picture. Clinicians in the United States, Spain, United Kingdom, and China anecdotally report a “silent sub-epidemic of people who need care at hospitals but dare not come in,” the article states, noting people with symptoms of appendicitis, heart attacks, stroke, infected gall bladders, and bowel obstructions are avoiding hospital emergency rooms.

“Everybody is frightened to come to the ER,” Mount Sinai Health System cardiovascular surgeon John Puskas, MD, told the Post. Though his 60-bed cardiac unit had been repurposed to care for COVID-19 patients, Puskas said the New York hospital system was seeing “dramatically fewer” cardiac patients. 

Concerned that patients may be ignoring signs of heart attack or stroke rather than go to a hospital, the American College of Cardiology launched the “CardioSmart” campaign, which urges anyone experiencing heart symptoms to get prompt treatment and to continue routine appointments, using telehealth technology when available.

“Hospitals have safety measures to protect you from infection,” the CardioSmart website states. “Getting care quickly is critical. You’ll get better faster, and you’ll limit damage to your health.”

However, David Brown, MD, Chief of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, argues the number of people having heart-related issues is unlikely to have dropped during the pandemic.

“Strokes and heart attacks don’t take a vacation just because there’s a pandemic,” Brown told The Boston Globe. “They’re still happening. They just aren’t happening as much inside the hospital, which is a major concern to me.”

Many healthcare professionals are worried about the long-term effect from pandemic-delayed preventative and elective procedures.

“The big question is are we going to see a lot more people that have bad outcomes from heart disease, from stroke, from cancer because they’ve put off what they should have had done, but were too afraid to come to the hospital?” Providence St. Joseph Health CEO Rod Hochman, MD, told CNBC.

Hochman, who is Chair-elect of the American Hospital Association (AHA), maintains the aftereffects of people putting off elective surgeries and screening procedures like colonoscopies and mammograms may be felt for years to come.

“We’re possibly going to see a blip in other disease entities as a consequence of doubling down on COVID-19,” he told CNBC.

In clinical laboratories, COVID-19 testing may have somewhat helped offset the drop in routine testing volume. However, the pandemic’s overall financial costs to labs and pathology groups will likely be felt for months to years, as patients slowly return to healthcare providers’ offices and hospitals.

—Andrea Downing Peck

Related Information:

From Mid-March, Labs Saw Big Drop in Revenue

Opening Up America Again

Doctors Worry the Coronavirus Is Keeping Patients Away from U.S. Hospitals as ER Visits Drop: ‘Heart Attacks Don’t Stop.’

When Doctors Think Patient Visits Will Rebound

Coronavirus and Your Heart: Don’t Ignore Heart Symptoms

‘Strokes and Heart Attacks Don’t Take a Vacation.’ So Why Have Emergency Department Visits Sharply Declined?

This is Where All 50 States Stand on Reopening

COVID-19 Triggers a Cash Flow Crash at Clinical Labs Totaling US $5.2 Billion in Past Seven Weeks; Many Labs Are at Brink of Financial Collapse

Lab-on-a-Fiber Technology Continues to Highlight Nano-Scale Clinical Laboratory Diagnostic Testing in Point-of-Care Environments

Ever shrinking “lab-on-a-…” technologies, a boon to medical laboratories and anatomic pathologists in remote resource-strapped regions, also have a place in modern labs

Researchers took another leap forward in reducing the size of clinical laboratory diagnostic tests and observational tools. This demonstration involved lab-on-a-fiber technology and showed promise in both monitoring anatomic pathology biomarkers in vivo and supplementing the abilities of existing lab-on-a-chip and microfluidic devices.

Lab-on-a-Fiber Next Technological Step Toward Miniaturization

In 2013, Dark Daily reported on research into an implantable laboratory-on-a-chip (LOC) for monitoring blood chemistry during chemotherapy. It was a major breakthrough at the time, which promised new and powerful tools for cancer treatment regimens.

However, most LOC systems aren’t designed for wet environments. Also, while microfluidics and flexible membranes allow for smaller footprints and tighter placement, they are still invasive in ways that might make patients uncomfortable or make real-world use less than ideal. And, long-term use brings further complications, such as corrosion or foreign-body granulomas.

Thus, lab-on-a-fiber’s ability to function in vivo, is one of the device’s principal advantages, as ExtremeTech noted.

Lab-on-a-fiber technology addresses many concerns. It is small enough to insert directly into organs, muscle mass, or veins when used as biosensors. And the fibers can return a wealth of information by using light and reflection, while allowing for minimal discomfort and precision placement.

Schematic of the lab-on-a-fiber biosensing principle. A metallic nanostructure supporting a resonant plasmonic mode is integrated on the optical fiber tip. When a molecular binding event occurs at the sensor surface, the reflectance peak associated to the plasmonic mode shifts towards longer wavelengths. (Image and caption copyright: Analyst/The Royal Society of Chemistry.)

The Past and Future of Scaling Clinical Laboratory Testing

Dark Daily has followed these miniaturization trends for years starting with their earliest stages. A detailed timeline of developments can be viewed in “Lab-on-a-Chip Diagnostics: When Will Clinical Laboratories See the Revolution?” from 2016.

Additional Dark Daily “lab-on-a-…” coverage includes:

In the past year, a myriad of lab-on-a-fiber applications also have received media coverage, including:

Developers believe lab-on-a-fiber approaches could offer further adaptability and functionality to other “lab-on-a-…” technologies. For example, as highlighted in Advanced Science News, researchers are employing lab-on-a-fiber technologies to further refine and improve LOC functions and designs.

“As the scientific world moves inexorably to smaller dimensions … The emerging concept of ‘lab‐on‐fiber’ will give the optical fiber platform additional (highly integrated) functionalities,” noted Deepak Uttamchandani, PhD, Vice Dean Research, Faculty of Engineering, and, Robert Blue, PhD, Research Fellow, both at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, in their review paper, “Recent Advances In Optical Fiber Devices for Microfluidics Integration.” The paper, published in the Journal of Biophotonics, examined “the recent emergence of miniaturized optical fiber-based sensing and actuating devices that have been successfully integrated into fluidic microchannels that are part of microfluidic and lab‐on‐chip systems.”

Deepak Uttamchandani, PhD

In his review paper on the emerging concept of lab-on-a-fiber, Deepak Uttamchandani, PhD, notes, “The versatility of the optical fiber platform has already allowed researchers to conduct immunoassays in microchannels using both fluorescently‐labelled and label‐free formats whilst gaining advantages of reduced assay time and increased sensitivity.” (Photo copyright: University of Strathclyde.)

Lab-on-a-Fiber: Another Step Forward or a Major Change?

At each milestone in the scaling of clinical laboratory testing, experts and media outlets predicted the demise of big laboratories and the dawn of a POC-centric testing era. Yet, despite 20-plus years of progress, this has yet to happen.

While it is critical for anatomical pathology leaders and clinical laboratory managers to stay abreast of developments in testing technology, much of the innovation behind lab-on-a-fiber remains strictly in the research realm. Challenges to the commercialization of these new techniques include both physical factors, such as design and manufacture of ready-to-use tests, and regulatory concerns, including FDA clearances and payer approval of new assays and diagnostic procedures.

Until researchers and test manufacturers overcome these hurdles, threats to current standards and workflows are minimal. However, much like the gains in scale realized through incorporating lab-on-a-chip concepts into clinical laboratory testing, the research powering these innovations might prove useful in further improving and expanding medical laboratory testing options.

—Jon Stone

 

Related Information:

Optical Fiber Devices for Microfluidics Integration Open Up New Horizons for Advanced “Lab-on-a-Chip” Technologies

Recent Advances in Optical Fiber Devices for Microfluidics Integration

Lab-on-Fiber Technology: A New Vision for Chemical and Biological Sensing [Abstract]

Lab-on-Fiber Technology: A New Vision for Chemical and Biological Sensing [Full Downloadable PDF]

How We’re Shrinking Chemical Labs onto Optical Fibers

Lab-on-Fiber Could Shine Light on Disease

Doctors Might Soon Diagnose You by Feeding a Lab-on-a-Fiber Straight into Your Veins

Fiber-Optic Device Can Detect Stray Cancer Cells and Improve Tumor Removal: Study

Fiber Optic Probe Beats a Biopsy for Measuring Muscle Health

Lab-on-a-Chip Diagnostics: When Will Clinical Laboratories See the Revolution?

Implantable Medical Laboratory-on-a-Chip Continuously Monitors Key Chemicals in Chemotherapy and High-Risk Patients

In the Field of Nano-Scale Diagnostics, Many Researchers Are Developing ‘Lab-on-Skin’ Technologies That Can Monitor Many Clinical Laboratory Biomarkers

Hematology on a Chip: University of Southampton Develops POC Blood Analysis

Sleek ‘Lab in a Needle’ Is an All-in-One Device That Detects Liver Toxicity in Minutes during a Study, Showing Potential to Supplant Some Medical Laboratory Tests

Whole Animal Assays Use Lab-on-a-Chip at MIT

IBM and Mount Sinai Researchers Develop Innovative Medical Lab-on-a-Chip Solution

In the Field of Nano-Scale Diagnostics, Many Researchers Are Developing ‘Lab-on-Skin’ Technologies That Can Monitor Many Clinical Laboratory Biomarkers

IBM and Mount Sinai Researchers Develop Innovative Medical Lab-on-a-Chip Solution

Clinical laboratories and pathology groups may eventually use these devices to detect minute quantities of biomarkers

IBM has regularly declared its interest in being a player in the field of healthcare big data. Now comes news that the information technology giant wants to develop lab-on-a-chip (LOC) technology that can handle different types of clinical laboratory and anatomic pathology tests.

As reported in Nature Nanotechnology, researchers at IBM are working with a team from Mount Sinai Health System. Together, they created a lab-on-a-chip device capable of separating biomolecules as small as 20nm in length from urine, saliva, or blood samples without the need for specialized clinical laboratory equipment. The technology is called nanoDLD.

Current testing of this lab-on-a-chip focuses on exosomes and cancer research. However, researchers note that the asymmetric pillar array on their silicon chip can also separate DNA, viruses, and protein complexes. With further development, they hope to separate particles down to 10nm in length. This would allow isolation of specific proteins. (more…)

Growing Wave of Hospital and Health System Mega-Mergers Means Changing Dynamics for Pathology and Clinical Laboratory Medicine

Accelerating pace of hospital consolidation brings new pressure to pathologists and clinical laboratory directors to maximize the value of pathology services

Large and financially-stable multi-hospital health systems are racing to form regional mega-systems. It’s a strategy to get ahead of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) mandate to improve quality and increase efficiency through coordinated care across the entire care continuum.

This growing national trend means further consolidation of clinical laboratory testing services within the merging organizations. For pathology groups, the new super-systems may encourage the different pathology groups within the system to consolidate into a single practice entity. This would help improve how pathology services are more deeply integrated into the care continuum. It would also facilitate contract negotiations between the pathologists and the parent health system. (more…)

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