The big lab groups like Quest, LabCorp, and others provide testing services for your practice, giving you access to quality results and therefore helping you make treatment decisions utilizing evidence-based medicine. The services these groups provide are based on you utilizing their equipment because the testing is either too expensive to do in your own clinic or you don’t have the resources, whether it be staffing, space, or time, to do the testing in clinic.
What if I told you that this model, this practice of utilizing outside testing services is outdated and no longer relevant to utilize for all of your testing needs?
Utilizing patient labs to make an informed decision is just as important, if not more so in some cases, as your initial impression, history, and physical you perform with your patient. The results of lab tests can give you knowledge of what may be going on or can confirm a diagnosis. Lab tests can be vital in diagnosis and can help you create your treatment plan for your patients. Therefore, good testing is vital. Programs provided by groups like Quest, etc., do provide quality results and can be essential to your practice but there are alternatives that you, the independent practices, should consider.
Working with practices and analyzing their testing practices, I see that a lot of practices are either doing the majority of their testing off-site through big lab groups and are therefore ineligible for reimbursement, or they are saddled with contracts and equipment that no longer provides them the revenue stream they were promised.
The approach that many large vendors and labs take is to provide testing for a clinic while they do not take the details of each individual clinic into account, they do not keep abreast of changes in healthcare reimbursement that are being pushed through, and are mainly concerned primarily with their own bottom line. With constantly shrinking reimbursement rates, I recognize that many of you are searching for ways to improve your financial state. The key is to look at your practice, what you are already doing, and work to change how you are performing some of your services and/or add on to them.
As an alternative to Quest or LabCorp, or many others, we work as a clinical laboratory consultant to your practice to ensure you are appropriately compensated for the patient base you support. We work hand-in-hand with you to analyze your needs and build a service from the ground up, even combining with your current setup, to bring you justifiable in-house solutions that will help improve the care you provide your patients and, best of all, return revenue to your practice that is being lost to over-bearing contracts and/or sending all of your testing out.
Clinical laboratory consultants should take all of your current needs into consideration, look at the entirety of your practice, put that information together with current reimbursement rates as well as take into account any known changes that are coming about in reimbursement, and develop a plan for your practice to recoup the reimbursement you are losing to outside testing. Then, when justifiable and based on your specific practice, act on that plan to bring what testing that they can back into your practice so that you are not only providing better and faster care for your patients, but you are legally being reimbursed for those services.
We are able to help you determine what your practice needs and implement it; we help you with accreditation, staffing, financing, validation, testing, and maintenance. We will help your practice earn back the revenue that it has lost out to other vendors and services.