Creating more value from hospital labs: Partnership models for the modern area
Abstract
American health systems — and the clinical laboratories they run — have for years experienced financial, labour, data and other pressures as a result of internal and external factors such as decreases in reimbursements, consolidation and policy changes. While these challenges existed before the COVID-19 pandemic, the pandemic has introduced added volatility in lab staffing, supply chains and profitability while building new inroads into remote lab administration. Amid these trends, many hospitals are shifting their lab management strategy towards partnership models and stewardship programmes that optimise resources, cut waste and promote business and patient outcomes. Buoyed by annual savings of up to 15 per cent and improvements in guideline-aligned lab formularies, such models scale from independently managed operations to shared ownership structures, with many options in between. This paper explores these emerging structures and looks at how health systems can identify the right model — if any — for them to create more value from lab operations while overcoming the many strains of the modern healthcare environment.
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Author's Biography
Michael Lukas Mike Lukas is a transformational healthcare business leader who translates the needs of health systems into actionable and impactful lab services and solutions that go beyond reference testing. This is accomplished by designing and executing customisable lab services solutions across the country within the health systems segment. Mike believes that when it comes to a health system’s laboratory impact, quality should not be a trade-off, service should not be a sacrifice and cost should not be a barrier. Mike joined Quest as VP of Finance in 2007 and has led the health systems segment since Quest launched it in 2013. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame with an MBA in Finance and from Saint Meinrad College with a BA in History.
Donna Cooper , MS, MBA, is focused on helping hospital systems set and achieve lab test ordering optimisation goals through laboratory stewardship. She is the Senior Director of Product Solutions for the Health Systems Division of Quest Diagnostics. Prior to Quest, Donna worked at Cleveland Clinic as the Manager of Laboratory Client Services and Lab Stewardship, where she led an initiative to centralise and standardise the procedure for notifying caregivers of critical and urgent laboratory result values. She also worked at ARUP laboratories as the Manager of Marketing Analytics, overseeing the delivery of the ATOP report. Donna earned a master’s degree in Oncological Science and an MBA with a certificate in Healthcare Administration from the University of Utah.
Citation
Lukas, Michael and Cooper, Donna (2022, September 1). Creating more value from hospital labs: Partnership models for the modern area. In the Management in Healthcare: A Peer-Reviewed Journal, Volume 7, Issue 1. https://doi.org/10.69554/BHYX6366.
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