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

Hosted by Robert Michel

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

Hosted by Robert Michel
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In 2017, to Offset Declining Reimbursement and Shrinking Budgets, Savvy Clinical Laboratories Are Using LEAN to Improve Service and Intelligently Cut Costs

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…)

Clinical Pathology Laboratory Managers Use Lessons in the Best of Medical Laboratory Quality to Improve Lab Operations and Patient Safety

Nation’s largest gathering of clinical laboratory Lean, Six Sigma, and process improvement practitioners took place in New Orleans this week

DATELINE: NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA—More than 300 of the nation’s leading quality improvement practitioners in clinical laboratory operations came together this week to share, learn, and master the best approaches to improving the quality of medical laboratory operations in ways that improve performance and productivity even while delivering substantial reductions in cost.

The opening session of the Ninth Annual Laboratory Quality Confab featured three clinical laboratories that have aggressively used quality management methods, including Lean and Six Sigma. These are labs that are strategically committed to creating and sustaining a culture of quality and continuous process improvement. (more…)

Medical Laboratories in Canada Face Squeeze from a Retiring Labor Force, the Need to Acquire New Diagnostic Technologies, and Increased Demand for Lab Tests

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…)

Nation’s Clinical Laboratories and Pathology Groups Face Greatest Pressure to Cut Costs and Deliver More Value Than at Any Other Time in Past 25 Years

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…)

Study of Cross-Contamination of Biopsy Specimens in 69 Anatomic Pathology Laboratories Raises Concerns about Test Quality and Patient Safety

Extraneous tissue cross-contamination found in all participating pathology laboratories Cross-tissue contamination, regardless of specimen volume or how frequently reagents were changed

Pathologists and histotechnologists have long known that traditional methods of processing tissue for diagnosis have the potential to cross-contaminate human biopsy specimens. This risk to patient safety and diagnostic accuracy was accepted over the decades because of the limitations of technology and inability to more precisely measure the performance of individual work processes in the histology laboratory.

In recent years, two things have begun to change this long-standing status quo in medical laboratories. These developments now make it possible to more accurately measure the performance of histology work processes. In turn, this allows an understanding of the true rate of errors that happen from the time a human biopsy specimen arrives in the anatomic pathology laboratory until the completed slides are ready to be diagnosed by a pathologist. (more…)

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