4 Tips to Grow and Manage Your Lab Outreach Program

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.