August 2024

August 21, 2024

Outreach is an important piece of any successful laboratory. For reference or specialty laboratories, their whole business model is based on acquiring and retaining business from providers. For hospital laboratories, outreach programs can be essential for maximizing capacity and generating additional revenue in the face of rising costs and declining reimbursement.

However, for many labs, technology constraints make growing and managing their outreach programs a challenge. Data and processes are scattered across a variety of disconnected systems and spreadsheets, making it difficult for sales and service teams to collaborate on acquiring new business and ensuring customer satisfaction.

hc1 client M Health Fairview Reference Laboratories (MRL) has built a highly successful outreach program over the years, with over 1,500 active clients. In a recent hc1 webinar, Eric Razskazoff, MRL’s System Manager, Business Development, offered the following tips for growing and managing a lab outreach program.

Leverage Insights to Increase Revenue

Data insights on your clients, such as ordering history and revenue data, can be a great asset in growing your business with existing providers.

For example, MRL was trying to grow their allergy testing platform, but had a key client that wasn’t ordering any allergy testing. So they pulled ordering history and revenue data for similar clinics and presented this data to the client to make a business case for adding allergy testing.

“We were able to take information that we had in hc1 from a like client of ours and create some solutions to show the other client what they were missing out on and the money they were leaving on the table.”

Educate Providers to Optimize Test Ordering

These same data insights can also be used to educate providers on test ordering best practices. This can both free up capacity for your lab and improve patient care.

Some assisted living providers were over-ordering INRs from MRL. Not only did they lack the capacity and staffing to handle this testing, but it was unnecessary and negatively impacting patient care through patient discomfort, burdening front-line staff, billing denials and unnecessary downstream testing.

“hc1 gave us the insights needed to identify the providers that were over-ordering. We then partnered with a physician group to have a discussion on the ordering of labs overall, primarily INRs, and if there were better ways to utilize our services and find a win-win for the patients.”

Provide Proactive Customer Service

While it’s one thing to bring in new business, it’s equally important to provide strong, proactive customer service to retain that business.

Having comprehensive, real-time insights into client health, such as volume, turnaround time and client issues is key to getting ahead of problems before it’s too late. For example, MRL had a client that was continually sending incorrect billing information. With hc1, they were able to identify these issues and work with the client on a resolution.

“We wanted to provide that information to the client to say, ‘this is what we’re seeing.’ hc1 was able to help us see these issues so we could improve the process, not only for us, but for our client as well.”

Implement Easy-to-Use Technology

Each of the previous three tips are essential for labs to grow and manage their outreach programs. But without a comprehensive, easy-to-use technology platform to manage it all, reps will be stuck spending much of their time toggling between systems and carrying out manual workflows.

hc1 pulls labs’ disparate data sources into a single platform purpose built for clinical laboratories. With sales, service and operations able to access the data and workflows they need in a single platform, labs can eliminate inefficiencies. Plus, with hc1’s easy-to-use, modern interface, reps can get up to speed in no time.

“Reps on our client services team don’t necessarily have a lab background. And I don’t know that you need to have one when using hc1. It’s very simple to use and very user friendly. We use hc1 as our source of truth.”

Could you benefit from a single source of truth for your lab sales and service teams? A platform to help you grow and retain your business? If so, request a demo with an hc1 expert today to learn more about our analytics and CRM tools built for labs.

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Mackin Bannon is the Product Marketing Manager for hc1. Mackin held various roles covering nearly every marketing area before settling on product marketing as a focus and joining hc1 in 2022. During the workday, he enjoys bringing stories to life in clear and creative ways. In his free time, he enjoys following his favorite sports teams, collecting vinyl records and exploring Indianapolis.

August 7, 2024

Many labs struggle to obtain the insights they need to run their business, for a variety of reasons. All too often, labs run on an array of siloed systems – the LIS, the billing system, the CRM – that don’t talk to one another and aren’t designed to provide robust lab analytics, enable effective outreach or manage customer service.

Some labs may manage reporting and outreach manually in spreadsheets, a time-consuming process when there is little time to waste. Others may rely on teams outside the lab and hope they have time to get to their project. But these groups, such as IT, are stretched just as thin as the laboratory and often have to serve the entire organization.

What labs need is a technology solution that not only provides them the data and tools they need, but that enables them to self-serve. When lab leaders are enabled with robust analytics built for the lab that are quick and easy to access and allow for customization, it allows them to make timely, data-driven decisions to grow their business and improve patient care.

Thankfully, hc1 is able to provide that solution! Continue reading to learn more about how hc1 enables lab leaders to become their own data analyst with self-serve reporting built for the lab.

hc1 Gets the Lab

Part of what makes hc1 so unique is that we exclusively serve clinical laboratories. hc1 was created because our founder recognized that if labs could organize the vast amounts of powerful data they produce into actionable insights, they could be empowered to better manage operations, as well as personalize and advance care for all patients.

Because of this, we understand laboratories both from a relational and technical perspective. We know labs’ struggles, goals and desires, because many of our employees are former laboratorians. And we’re masters of healthcare data and laboratories’ native data format, having served hundreds of lab locations and integrated with over 80 unique lab systems.

All Your Lab Data in One Place

hc1 tears down the data silos in your lab by aggregating your key lab data sources into a single, cloud-based environment. This eliminates those hours upon hours of manual data collection. Then, to power you up, we can integrate other data sources – billing, couriers, supplies, instrumentation, EMR – to help you surpass the limitations of these narrowly focused systems.

We also standardize and validate your data. Just like not all PR is good PR, not all data is good data. Data on tests or patient encounters in different systems doesn’t always line up. There can be inconsistencies between hospitals within a health system or lab departments within an organization. Messy data will produce messy results, so we ensure that your data is clean so you can gain accurate insights into your lab.

Robust, Real-Time Lab Reporting

Our suite of robust analytics tools goes far beyond what laboratory information systems, or even big-name analytics tools, can provide. Built for the lab from the ground up, hc1 unlocks your data’s vast potential by revealing actionable insights that enable you to drive superior performance and care.

hc1 Performance Analytics provides deep analysis on volume, turnaround time, spend and more.
hc1 PrecisionDx Advisor delivers advanced test utilization insights that help you reduce unnecessary testing.
hc1 Workforce Optimization uses predictive analytics to project future volume trends and provide actionable staff scheduling recommendations.
We even offer dashboards for optimizing sendouts and monitoring blood utilization.

With hc1, you no longer need to turn to IT or other teams for custom lab reporting – you have everything you need at your fingertips.

Become Your Own Data Analyst

However, for those times where you do want to go beyond what hc1’s standard dashboards provide, we offer hc1 Insights Builder. This tool enables you to design, build and manage custom dashboards and reports. Whether you want to copy and tweak one of our standard dashboards or create something from scratch, we give you the power to design data analytics to meet your needs – without needing advanced knowledge or expertise.

With Insights Builder, you don’t have to:

Pay exorbitant consulting fees to have a vendor expert come in and create custom reports.
Download and manipulate data in Excel, putting your organization at risk of a security breach.
Sit around and wait for other teams to get to your custom reporting request.

hc1 can serve as your lab’s single source of truth – the one place you can go to gain insight into all areas of your business. No more siloed data. No more manual processes. No more reliance on other teams to get you the information you need to succeed. To see how hc1 can help you become your own data analyst, request a demo with an hc1 expert today.