How medical laboratories can show value through process improvement methods and analytics will be among many key topics presented at the upcoming Lab Quality Confab conference
Quality management is the clinical laboratory’s best strategy for surviving and thriving in this era of shrinking lab budgets, PAMA price cuts, and value-based payment. In fact, the actions laboratories take in the next few months will set the course for their path to clinical success and financial sustainability in 2020 and beyond.
But how do medical laboratory managers and pathologists address these challenges while demonstrating their lab’s value? One way is through process improvement methods and another is through the use of analytics.
Clinical pathologists, hospital lab leaders, and independent lab executives have told Dark Daily that the trends demanding their focus include:
Ensuring needed resources and appropriate tests,
while the lab is scrutinized by insurance companies and internally by hospital
administration;
“Our impact on patient care, in many cases, is very
indirect. So, it is difficult to point to outcomes that occur. We know things
we do matter and change patient care, but objectively showing that is a real
struggle. And we are being asked to do more than we ever had before, and those
are the two big things that keep me up at night these days,” he added.
This is where process improvement methods and analytics are
helping clinical laboratories understand critical issues and find opportunities
for positive change.
“You need to have a strategy that you can adapt to a changing landscape in healthcare. You have to use analytics to guide your progress and measure your success,” Patricia Nortmann, System Director of Laboratory Services at St. Elizabeth Healthcare, Erlanger, Ky., told Dark Daily.
Clinical Laboratories Can Collaborate Instead of Compete
Prior to a joint venture with TriHealth in Cincinnati, St. Elizabeth lab leaders used data to inform their decision-making. Over about 12 years preceding the consolidation of labs they:
Implemented front-end automation outside the core area and in the microbiology lab.
“We are now considered a regional reference lab in the state
of Kentucky for two healthcare organizations—St. Elizabeth and TriHealth,”
Nortmann said.
Thanks to these changes, the lab more than doubled its
workload, growing from 2.1 million to 4.3 million outreach tests in the core
laboratory, she added.
Christopher Doern, PhD (left), Director of Microbiology and Associate Professor of Pathology at Virginia Commonwealth University Health System; Patricia Nortmann (center), System Director of Laboratory Services at St. Elizabeth Healthcare; and Joseph Cugini (right), Manager Client Solutions at Health Network Laboratories, will present practical solutions and case studies in quality improvement and analytics for clinical laboratory professionals at the 13th Annual Lab Quality Confab, October 15-16, 2019, at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, Ga. (Photo copyright: The Dark Report.)
Using Analytics to Test the Tests
Clinical laboratories also are using analytics and information technology (IT) to improve test utilization.
At VCH Health, Doern said an analytics solution interfaces
with their LIS, providing insights into test orders and informing decisions
about workflow. “I use this analytics system in different ways to answer
different questions, such as:
How are clinicians using our tests?
When do things come to the lab?
When should we be working on them?
“This is important for microbiology, which is a very delayed
discipline because of the incubation and growth required for the tests we do,”
he said.
Using analytics, the lab solved an issue with Clostridium
difficile (C diff) testing turnaround-time (TAT) after associating it with
specimen transportation.
Inappropriate or duplicate testing also
can be revealed through analytics. A physician may reconsider a test after discovering
another doctor recently ordered the same test. And the technology can guide
doctors in choosing tests in areas where the related diseases are obscure, such
as serology.
Avoiding Duplicate Records While
Improving Payment
Another example of process
improvement is Health Network Laboratories (HNL) in Allentown, Pa. A team there established an enterprise master patient index (EMPI) and implemented digital tools to find and eliminate
duplicate patient information and improve lab financial indicators.
“The system uses trusted sources of data to make sure data is clean and the lab has what it needs to send out a proper bill. That is necessary on the reimbursement side—from private insurance companies especially—to prevent denials,” Joseph Cugini, HNL’s Manager Client Solutions, told Dark Daily.
HNL reduced duplicate records in its database from 23% to
under one percent. “When you are talking about several million records, that is
quite a significant improvement,” he said.
Processes have improved not only on the billing side, but in
HNL’s patient service centers as well, he added. Staff there easily find
patients’ electronic test orders, and the flow of consumers through their
visits is enhanced.
Learn More at Lab Quality Confab Conference
Cugini, Doern, and Nortmann will speak on these topics and more during the 13th Annual Lab Quality Confab (LQC), October 15-16, 2019, at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, Ga. They will offer insights, practical knowledge, and case studies involving Lean, Six Sigma, and other process improvement methods during this important 2-day conference, a Dark Dailynews release notes.
Register for LQC, which is produced by Dark Daily’s sister publication The Dark Report, online at https://www.labqualityconfab.com/register, or by calling 512-264-7103.
To offset the loss of revenue from the price cuts to Medicare Part B clinical laboratory tests, labs will need to aggressively—but wisely—slash costs to balance their budgets
Many experienced industry executives expect this to be the single most financially disruptive event to hit the clinical laboratory profession in more than 20 years. This will not only have a substantial negative financial impact on all labs—large and small—but two sectors of the clinical lab industry are considered to be so financially vulnerable they could cease to exist.
At Greatest Risk of Financial Failure are Community Laboratories
The first sector is comprised of smaller community lab companies that operate in towns and rural areas. These labs are at the greatest risk because they are the primary providers of lab testing services to the nursing homes and skilled nursing facilities in their neighborhoods. And because they have a high proportion of Medicare Part B revenue.
Thus, the expected Medicare price cuts to the high-volume automated lab tests—such as chemistry panels and CBCs (complete blood count) that are the bread-and-butter tests for these labs—will swiftly move them from minimal profit margins to substantial losses. Since these labs have a cost-per-test that is significantly higher than the nation’s largest public lab companies, they will be unable to financially survive the 2018 Medicare fee cuts.
The second sector at risk is comprised of rural hospitals and modest-sized community hospitals. What officials at CMS and their consulting companies overlooked when they created the PAMA (Protecting Access to Medicare Act) private payer market price reporting rule is that these hospitals provide lab testing services to nursing homes and office-based physicians in their service areas.
Because of the low volumes of testing in these hospital labs, they also have a larger average cost-per-test than the big public labs. Thus, the 2018 cuts to Medicare Part B lab test prices will erode or erase any extra margin from this testing that now accrues to these hospitals.
Rural and Small Community Hospitals Rely on Lab Outreach Revenue
The financial disruption these Medicare lab test price cuts will cause to rural and community hospitals is a real thing. These hospitals rely on outreach lab test revenues to subsidize many other clinical services within the hospital. One rural hospital CEO confirmed the importance of lab outreach revenue to her organization. Michelle McEwen, FACHE, CEO of Speare Memorial Hospital in Plymouth, N.H., spoke to The Dark Report in 2012 about the financial disruption that was happening when a major health insurer excluded her hospital’s laboratory from its network.
Speare Memorial is a 25-bed critical access hospital in the central part of the state between the lakes region and the White Mountain National Forest. McEwen was blunt in her assessment of the importance of clinical laboratory outreach revenues to her hospital. “The funds generated by performing these [outreach] lab tests are used to support the cost of providing laboratory services to all patients 24/7, including stat labs for emergency patients and inpatients,” McEwen explained. “These funds also help support other services in the hospital where losses are typically incurred, such as the emergency room and obstetric programs.” (See “Critical Access Hospitals Losing Lab Test Work,” The Dark Report, April 2, 2012.)
All Medical Laboratories Will Suffer Financial Pain from Medicare Price Cuts
But it is not just community lab companies and rural hospitals that are at risk of financial failure as the Medicare Part B cuts are implemented by CMS on Jan. 1, 2018. Any clinical laboratory serving Medicare patients will experience a meaningful drop in revenue. Many larger hospital and health system laboratories are recasting their financial projections for 2018 to identify how big a drop in revenue they will experience and what cost-cutting strategies will be needed to at least break even on their lab outreach business.
This explains why the first big trend of 2018 will be substantial revenue cuts from the Medicare program. It also explains why the second big trend of 2018 will be smart cost-cutting as labs attempt to balance their books and lower spending proportional to the reduced income they project.
Labs Have a Decade of Successful Cost-Cutting, More Cuts are Difficult
Aggressive cost-cutting, however, puts the nation’s medical laboratories at risk for a different reason. For the past decade, most well-run labs have already harvested the low-hanging fruit from obvious sources of cost reduction. They installed latest-generation automation. They re-engineered workflows using the techniques of Lean, Six Sigma, and process improvement.
During these same years, most medical laboratories also reduced technical staff and trimmed management ranks. That has created two new problems:
First, there are not enough managers in many labs to both handle the daily flow of work while also tackling specific projects to cut costs and boost productivity. Basically, these labs are already at their management limit, with no excess capacity for their lab managers to initiate and implement cost-cutting projects.
Second, technical staffs are already working at near peak capacity. Increased use of automation at these labs has reduced lab costs because labs were able to do the same volume of testing with fewer staff. However, the reduced staffs that oversee the lab automation are now working at their own peak capacity. Not only are they highly stressed from the daily routine, they also do not have spare time to devote to new projects designed to further cut costs.
Each Year Will Bring Additional Cuts to Medicare Part B Lab Prices
This is why all clinical laboratories in the United States will find it difficult to deal with the Medicare Part lab test fee cuts that will total $400 million during 2018. And what must be remembered is that, in 2019 and beyond, CMS officials will use the PAMA private payer market price reporting rule to make additional fee cuts. Over 10 years, CMS expects these cuts will reduce spending by $5.4 billion from the current spending level.
Taken collectively, all these factors indicate that many medical laboratories in the United States will not survive these Medicare fee cuts. The basic economics of operating a clinical laboratory say that less volume equals a higher average cost per test and higher volume equals a lower average cost per test.
Medical Labs with Highest Costs Most at Risk of Failure from Price Cuts
What this means in the marketplace is that labs with the highest average cost per test make the least profit margin on a fee-for-service payment. The opposite is true for labs with the lowest average cost per test. They will make a greater profit margin on that same fee-for-service payment.
Carry this fundamental economic principle of medical laboratory operations forward as Medicare Part B lab test fee cuts happen in 2018. Labs with the highest average cost per test will be first to go from a modest profit or break-even to a loss. As noted earlier, the clinical lab sectors that have the highest average cost per test are smaller community labs, along with rural and community hospitals. That is why they will be first to go out of business—whether by sale, bankruptcy, or by simply closing their doors.
Learning How to Cut Lab Costs While Protecting Quality
Every pathologist and lab administrator seeking the right strategies to further cut costs in their lab, while protecting quality and enhancing patient services, will want to consider sending a team from their laboratory to the 11th Annual Lab Quality Confab that takes place in New Orleans on October 24-25, 2018.
Anticipating the greater need for shrewd cost-cutting that also protects the quality of the lab’s testing services, this year’s Lab Quality Confab has lined up more than 51 speakers and 39 sessions. Of particular interest are these extended workshops that come with certifications:
Lab Quality Confab is recognized for its use of lab case studies—taught by the nation’s early adopter lab organizations. Certification classes are available to gain proficiency in the use of Lean methods and Six Sigma tools, such as:
Developing single-piece and small batch workflow to cut TAT and lift productivity.
Given the strong interest in smart ways to cut costs, boost productivity, and balance revenue-versus-cost, registrations for this year’s Lab Quality Confab is running at a record pace. The full agenda can be viewed at this link (or copy this URL and paste into your browser: http://www.labqualityconfab.com/agenda).
Of special interest to lab leaders preparing to stay ahead of the financial impact of the Medicare Part B fee cuts, Lab Quality Confab offers deep discounts for four or more attendees from the same lab organization. This allows your lab’s most effective cost-cutters to see, hear, and learn together, so that when they return they can get a flying start helping you align your lab’s costs to the expected declines in revenue that will happen on Jan. 1, 2018.
Nation’s most experienced lab operations managers, cost-cutters, and Lean experts will gather to share successes and proven ideas at Lab Quality Confab on October 18-19, 2016
Most hospitals and health systems are in the first stages of developing their budgets for 2017. Clinical laboratory administrators and pathologists at these institutions report three common factors are driving the next budget cycle: falling reimbursement, flat or declining inpatient admissions, and directives to cut their lab budgets.
“At our health system, the challenge is a bit different,” said one lab administrator at a large Midwest hospital. “Inpatient volumes are increasing, but we get less money from health insurers per admission. For that reason, our budget planning requirement is to accept a smaller budget than last year, while planning to handle more specimen volume in 2017, compared to this year.” (more…)
In provinces across Canada, health systems are dealing with limited budgets, growing populations, and the need to transition to personalized medicine
Medical laboratories in Canada have something in common with medical laboratories in most other developed nations. Demand for healthcare services exceeds capacity, even as the healthcare system struggles to find adequate funding. This puts pathology labs in a bind, since they are asked to test growing numbers of specimens even as budgets are flat or shrinking.
That means the biggest two challenges facing labs in Canada will be familiar to pathologists, clinical chemists and medical laboratory scientists in almost every other developed nation across the globe. One challenge is how to meet the steady annual increase in lab specimens that must be tested. The second challenge is how to do that additional testing even as government health systems are forced to trim budgets year after year. (more…)
Blame it on shrinking hospital budgets and reduced lab testing prices; successful labs are using Lean, Six Sigma, and process improvement to reduce expenses and boost quality
Topic number one at clinical laboratories and anatomic pathology groups across the nation is cost-cutting, for two reasons. First, it is budget time at hospitals and labs are being told to aggressively reduce their costs in 2015. Second, health insurers are paying less for medical lab testing.
Simply said, labs are experiencing one of the toughest financial squeezes in two decades. Dark Daily has written about the underlying trends responsible for this financial pressure. Nationally, hospital inpatient admissions are down at the same time that hospitals are being paid less per inpatient. In response, hospitals are asking all clinical departments—including their clinical laboratories—to prune staff and cut budgets for 2015. (more…)
