Contributing lab leader: Steve Serota & Robin Herbner
Contributing lab leader: Steve Serota & Robin Herbner
Laboratory medicine plays a foundational role within the healthcare industry. Today, laboratory leaders have more opportunities to expand their reach beyond the confines of their own labs by providing outsourcing services to the broader healthcare community.
Smaller healthcare organizations, such as nursing facilities, local hospitals, and specialty clinics, are in need of providing the best care for their patients, especially as the demand for diagnostic testing and screening continues to skyrocket. Lab leaders can provide valuable diagnostic resources to these local healthcare organizations through clinical partnerships and by utilizing their core testing services. This offers labs the ability to expand their reach to patients across local regions, and at the same time, showcase their value as profit centers.
At this year’s annual Association for Diagnostics & Laboratory Medicine (ADLM) meeting, Steve Serota, President and COO of Wisconsin Diagnostic Laboratories and CEO of Atalan, and Robin Herbner, CAO of Wisconsin Diagnostic Laboratories and CFO of Atalan, shared seven actionable steps for lab leaders to grow their ecosystem by expanding outward and providing diagnostic testing to other healthcare organizations. By considering growth options outside of their immediate health system and providing outsourcing services, laboratory managers and directors can boost revenue for their organization and at the same time, provide incredibly valuable testing services to improve patient-centered care for the wider medical community.
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According to Serota and Herbner, the first step to growing the lab is to conduct an internal audit and understand your lab’s core capacity, expertise, and technology levels. This critical step involves discovering where there are current service gaps and the lab's unique niche that provides the most value to your organization.
“It's incredibly important for us to dig into who we are as a lab, what we have, and what we can utilize to go and grow,” said Serota.
After uncovering all the information from step one, the next step is to bring the rest of your organization on board to understand your lab’s trends and know which solutions provide the most value. This important step involves aligning leadership on both the clinical and financial sides to ensure all parties understand the lab's role in patient care, the value of outsourcing, and the economics of lab billing and finances..
By determining your lab's most valuable solutions in step one and aligning with clinical and financial leadership in step two, lab leaders should find methods to grow core capabilities. They also should identify ways to run their operations as efficiently as possible, addressing any service gaps, in order to start providing outsourcing services. “Laboratory medicine is a core component of all clinical health care, but we've got to be good at the nuts and bolts. We have to be incredibly operationally efficient,” commented Serota.
There are several ways that lab leaders can achieve this operational efficiency, including:
After understanding your lab’s core strengths and clearly addressing any operational gaps, the next step is identifying potential clients within the broader healthcare market looking to outsource their lab services. This step is when labs start to consider how their core solutions can provide value to other health systems.
Labs can offer valuable services to several verticals, including:
Herbner says the best place to start is with smaller ventures like home health agencies. In this case, the home health staff will draw samples from their patients and deliver the specimens to your lab. After delivery, your lab will analyze the samples and provide test results. “Knowing what your investment level is, your investment appetite and your expertise is going to really drive how successful you'll be in each of the verticals,” remarked Herbner.
“If you have the right financial partner and can create the right kind of strategic relationships, there is a ton of requisite value that comes in multiple places, especially as a health system laboratory,” said Serota.
After identifying potential clients within the market, the next step is creating alignment among both external and internal stakeholders on the clinical and financial sides by demonstrating a commitment to reducing costs and contributing to the overall health system.
One way to achieve this alignment is to engage with partners that benefit from early intervention, such as oncology or pharmacy services, and how your lab’s solutions can positively impact patient outcomes. “Not only do you reinforce the value that you bring to the table, but at the same time, you maximize the outcome benefit to your patient,” said Serota.
Once you’ve achieved alignment for outsourcing, labs can construct operational plans to outline how clients will benefit from the services. Plans can include specific workflows for the near and long term, sample cost interfaces and portals, and go-to-market strategies.
To bring your plan to life, labs can rapidly advance their progress through dashboards, developing strategic workflows, and further building industry partnerships. According to Serota, within three years, labs can transform themselves from a basic, core unit into a value-add contributor to the entire health system and communities.
“A mid-market laboratory is going to touch millions of people. There's probably no subspecialty that has a more directed impact on more people than the lab.”
If you want to hear more from Steve Serota and Robin Herbner on how to prepare your laboratory to provide outsourcing services to the wider healthcare community, click here to watch their full presentation from ADLM 2024.