Steve Halasey, chief editor, CLP
In recent years, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced many new initiatives affecting the settings in which patient care is delivered. Healthcare providers and private third-party payors have mostly followed CMS’s lead, joining in experiments with bundled payments, accountable care organizations, and other novel approaches to healthcare delivery.
Some of these shifts in policy and their related pilot programs are creations of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, colloquially known as Obamacare. But many are equally the results of advances in technology and large-scale trends in patient care.
Consolidation among hospitals has become a major and commonplace expression of such changes, in part brought about through the successes of modern healthcare. Where patients once underwent open surgical procedures that required lengthy recuperation stays in hospital care, minimally invasive techniques and refined surgical procedures are now making it possible for patients to go home—and even to return to work—sooner. Moreover, the adoption of simpler outpatient surgeries means that many patients never occupy a hospital bed at all, having their entire procedures performed on an outpatient basis.
But when healthcare settings shift from inpatient to outpatient environments, or when accountable care organizations create a seamless healthcare continuum from previously fragmented entities, what becomes of the clinical laboratories that used to serve their patients?
For an increasing number of laboratory directors and managers, coping with such shifts in the healthcare marketplace is an everyday reality. But those who are prepared may see the challenges of such change as opportunities as well.
Adjusting a laboratory’s presence to meet new market realities can permit lab directors and managers to optimize their lab’s location as well as to right-size its footprint. Making adjustments to a lab’s workflow, instrumentation, equipment, and staffing, are all tasks that can help labs to prepare for continued growth in areas where the healthcare systems of the future are headed.
As suggested in this issue’s feature on designing or upgrading clinical labs, however, these are not tasks that laboratory directors and managers are typically trained to handle. Analyzing a lab’s daily workflow in order to save steps and improve staff performance, or selecting equipment that will permit flexibility for future growth, are the types of activities that require the perspective that only hands-on experience can provide. But most lab directors don’t have the opportunity to undertake such ground-up activities more than once or twice in their entire careers.
Fortunately, those who have such expertise often take on consulting roles and share their expertise at conferences such as the annual meeting of the Clinical Laboratory Management Association, whose 2015 installment will take place March 29–April 1, in Orlando, Fl. See you there!
Steve Halasey
Chief Editor, CLP
[email protected]
(626) 219-0199
