What's Next for Hospital Labs? LabMetrics Helping to Sponsor the Answers.

With sweeping healthcare reforms and cost-cutting initiatives coming into place, diagnostic service providers face many challenges.

• How will these marketplace changes affect your business model?
• Are your long-term prospects bright or gloomy?
• What can you do to adapt and succeed in the quickly evolving field of hospital laboratory and diagnostic services?

LabMetrics is proud to be a silver sponsor for the upcoming one-day G2 Intelligence workshop on January 30, 2014, at the Westin Atlanta Airport. Industry representatives and leaders will be there to discuss how hospital laboratories can evolve to succeed in the new environment.

Is your lab’s business model well adapted to meet new challenges? This workshop will present successful models to consider, including joint ventures, equity arrangements, freestanding subsidiaries, and management agreements, examining the pros and cons of each model in detail.

It will also investigate the state of the industry and how health systems view diagnostic services, identify opportunities for growth, assess the role of better IT connectivity, and much more -providing an excellent opportunity to step back and assess where your business stands and how you can best tackle the latest cost-cutting trends affecting the industry as a whole.

LabMetrics Can Help to Understand and Evaluate the Numerous Trends that are Driving Healthcare Reform in the Current Marketplace.

Diagnostic laboratories, like every sector in health care today, are scrambling to adapt to reform trends, the most notable being lower reimbursement across the board. According to G2 Intelligence:

• All clinical labs saw a reimbursement reduction of nearly 5% during 2013, mostly resulting from lower Medicare fees and other government-driven actions.
• Molecular labs experienced an even higher reduction of up to 30% in payments due to Medicare gap-fill pricing.
  
• Some labs, such as anatomic pathology labs, saw even steeper drops in reimbursement, up to 52% in some cases for high volume tests.

Naturally, this trend is causing the most discomfort for diagnostic labs everywhere. LabMetrics understands the impact these reimbursement changes are having on your bottom line.

Another trend affecting laboratories is the physician-as-employee model in which many doctors in private practice are becoming hospital employees. The goal is better coordination of services for patients, but outreach labs that rely on independent physicians for most of their business have to find other revenue streams.

• One promising solution may be targeting direct contracts with employers looking for ways to reduce their healthcare costs.

New payment and care delivery models are also pressuring diagnostic laboratories to tie quality of services to compensation as the whole healthcare industry shifts focus from volume to value.

The G2 Intelligence Workshop will address the impact of these trends and many others on how diagnostic laboratories do business in the future.

LabMetrics Stays Focused on the Best of the Industry’s Future Prospects

With so many changes already taking place and so much at stake, finding the best innovative solutions and viable new models for your lab’s future can be a challenge.

As one of the industry’s leading life science consulting firms, LabMetrics is ready to share our expertise and knowledge accumulated over several decades in the industry delivering technology-enabled business and clinical solutions to our clients.

Visit us on the web at www.labmetrics.com.

LabMetrics will be at Pathology Institute 2014 - hope to connect with you then!