May 3, 2023

Staffing is the biggest problem labs are facing today. Between fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Great Resignation and a decline in laboratory training programs, there is a significant shortage of laboratory professionals. In fact, a recent survey uncovered that 73 percent of respondents indicated their laboratories were understaffed.

As lab professionals are being asked to do more with less, there are several risks. When lab departments are understaffed, it can lead to missed benchmarks and increased turnaround time. Additionally, understaffing can lead to burnout and the loss of even more resources – 85.3% of respondents to a survey by the American Society for Clinical Pathology reported having felt burnout as a laboratory professional.

Given the high stakes, it’s critical that laboratories ease the burden on their staff in the face of today’s labor shortages. Here are three steps labs can take to optimize their staffing.

1. Leverage timekeeping data to better understand staffing

The first step is to take a deeper dive into your lab’s timekeeping data. Looking at your staffing levels at particular times of day and days of the week, as well as seasonally, will help you gain a better understanding of your workforce. Maybe you need to shift some staff from one shift to another, or you need to hire additional staff during particular seasons you know are busier. Certain departments may be short-staffed, while others have more than enough staff.

2. Gain a clear picture of lab volume trends

It’s also important to look at volume trends. Similar to the review of staffing levels, look at your volume during particular times of day, on each day of the week and seasonally. Are your volumes lower in the morning but spiking in the afternoon? Are you busier on certain days of the week? Additionally, break down your volume by department to look for further trends. Does your molecular testing skyrocket during flu season? Do anatomic pathology tests tend to come in early or late in the week?

3. Connect staffing data with volume data to optimize staffing

The final step is to combine all this data and its insights to identify opportunities to optimize staffing. By bringing timekeeping and lab testing data together, you can ensure that you have the right amount of staff to cover the volume of tests coming into your lab.

For example, you may find that test volumes are typically higher on Saturdays, but your staffing levels are typically lower. You may need to incentivize more staff to work Saturdays so that you can ensure turnaround times do not suffer.

Maybe you’ve seen volumes decrease over the last couple of months in a specific department – possibly due to the loss of some key accounts – but staffing levels have remained the same. Instead of continuing on with more staff than is needed, you could train and reassign some individuals to another department that is short-staffed.

Making the Connection

While this may sound like a great way for laboratories to address labor shortages, with current lab technology it is a difficult and time-consuming process. Since timekeeping software and lab information systems don’t typically interface with one another, labs are left to manually download, compile and sift through the data looking for insights, a process that lab leaders don’t have time for.

For this reason, hc1 is developing a new solution to connect timekeeping data with lab testing data to optimize staffing based on volume by department.

hc1 Workforce Optimization™ will leverage historical data, real-time trends and AI to forecast lab volume and provide staffing recommendations in a near-turnkey solution, ensuring lab departments and teams are adequately staffed based on their expected workload.

hc1 is offering a limited opportunity to be one of the first to obtain hc1 Workforce Optimization and experience its benefits. Request a demo today to learn more.

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Mackin Bannon is the product marketing manager for hc1. Mackin held a variety of roles covering nearly every area of marketing 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, and in his free time, he enjoys following his favorite sports teams, collecting vinyl records and exploring Indianapolis.

June 7, 2023

When critical and urgent test result notifications are needed, speed, organization and efficiency are essential. Ensuring providers receive timely notification of results enables the patient to receive immediate and appropriate care. It also helps the lab meet service-level agreements and maintain strong relationships with providers.

However, critical and urgent notifications do not come without significant effort and coordination by the lab. Failure to notify providers in a timely fashion can lead to diagnostic errors, missed treatment and liability claims. The key for labs to avoid these pitfalls is collaboration across teams and departments.

Collaborating to ensure critical and urgent results are identified

First and foremost, it’s critical that staff across the lab—technicians, analysts, service reps, etc. are aware of the critical and urgent thresholds. Ideally, technology will be in place to trigger and alert when a test result crosses these thresholds and all appropriate staff will be notified. This ensures that critical and urgent results are not missed.

Collaborating to ensure the right staff have the right information

It’s equally important that teams collaborate across departments to ensure the right staff has the right information to notify providers of the results. The handoff of information as fast as possible from the technician or analyst that ran the sample to the service rep or individual responsible for contacting the provider is of the utmost importance. Again, technology that triggers a notification or creates a case for the service rep can ensure that critical and urgent results are acted on quickly.

Collaborating to ensure providers are notified in a timely manner

Lastly, it’s critical for the team communicating results to providers to have protocols and processes in place for collaboration. There should be a methodology for assigning result notifications to individual team members or allowing them to claim them as they come in. Collaborating and communicating within the team ensures that no one team member has too many calls on their plate and that the highest-priority results are handled first. Technology can help automate this process and take the burden off team members and managers.

Technology to help foster collaboration

We’ve seen how important cross-departmental collaboration is to ensuring providers receive timely notification of critical and urgent results. However, many labs still rely on manual processes, making it difficult to assign ownership and take action in a timely manner. Additionally, with processes and documentation often varying between different individuals and teams, it is hard to ensure a consistent and standardized response. Ultimately, delayed action on time-sensitive results impacts patient outcomes and provider satisfaction.

hc1 offers technology to help labs collaborate more effectively and take immediate action on critical and urgent test results.

hc1 Rapid Response Queue™ generates and prioritizes automated workflows based on clinical results and information pulled directly from the EMR or LIS, enabling teams to collaborate with real-time visibility and clear ownership of time-sensitive notifications. This enables labs to create a standardized process for critical and urgent result notifications, ensure required information is captured and documented, and help create positive patient outcomes when minutes matter.

Are you ready to enhance your critical and urgent workflows across departments? Request a demo today.

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April 19, 2023

Way past 5 o’clock at hc1 headquarters the night before the launch, hc1 Director of Client Enablement Maura Lee and hc1 Client Coordinator Alyssa Castille are laughing hysterically, and I’m feeling pretty slaphappy, too. We decide it’s time to stop tinkering with hc1 Academy, the customer education platform project we’ve been working on for months and head home. On launch day, we hosted webinars introducing the revamped platform and received positive responses from customers and internal users. Success! But getting to this point was a challenge.

The hc1 Technology department follows an Agile scrum process to develop software, where each scrum team plans the deliverable work it can accomplish in a two-week timeframe, called a “sprint.” The scrum master leads short daily meetings (stand-ups) to uncover obstacles and keep the team on track. At the end of the sprint, the team shows their work to everyone and then holds a closed meeting, called a retrospective, to openly discuss what went well, what problems occurred and what improvements could be made. This process serves to reduce risk by breaking down bigger projects into smaller tasks and provides the flexibility to incorporate feedback and adapt to changing circumstances.

The hc1 Client Success team’s process in developing the new hc1 Academy was more ad hoc than Agile, but we did borrow the idea of a retrospective to wrap up the project after launch. Here’s what we learned.

Measuring Success

Last year, Maura was looking to strengthen the customer focus of the learning management platform she used to deliver product training:

Instead of relying on email campaigns, she wanted an interactive webinar registration process, with customers choosing the topics that interested them.
She wanted to build a certification process to document customers’ level of expertise with the hc1 Platform.
She wanted to tailor the learning management platform to serve the needs of all customers, from prospects to partners, from seasoned system administrators to new users.

Around the same time, as senior technical writer, I was investigating options to replace the online help platform, because it wasn’t going to be supported for much longer. Also, customers and internal users had provided feedback indicating that finding the information they were looking for was difficult. I wanted the new platform to be more visually appealing and have a variety of ways to boost relevant content to users. I also wanted users to have an easy way to provide feedback on content, so I could make meaningful revisions quicker. Having all client training and customer-facing product documentation in one spot would be more convenient for both hc1 customers and the hc1 Technology team, so Maura and I decided to join forces.

The launch of the new and improved hc1 Academy achieved these defined goals and gained a few unexpected benefits:

We made our team more resilient. Before this project, Maura and I were the only administrators and subject matter experts for our respective platforms. Now, we, along with Alyssa, can together help maintain content and troubleshoot issues more efficiently.

We collaborated in new ways. In our day-to-day roles, our team is typically the one helping other teams achieve their goals by documenting, building training for, or communicating with clients about the work being done. This time, we were the ones driving the process, assigning the work and meeting with internal stakeholders. We had to make sure our user interface changes were approved by the product team and assigned to a technology sprint. We tapped into marketing’s design expertise to make sure the new hc1 Academy was both user-friendly and appropriately branded. We recruited coworkers to run through our user testing plans. We gained a new appreciation for the multiple talents throughout hc1.

Facing the Problems

The first few meetings with our learning management platform vendor representatives did not go well. The level of guidance we had anticipated from them was not what they were set up to deliver. After much frustration, we had to pause the project for several months and regroup. When we restarted it, we knew we had to drive the process and be much more specific about what the project needed to make the most of our professional services time.

One important change we made was that we stopped trying to share project management tasks. We put Alyssa in charge of communicating with the vendor, keeping our project meetings on track and following up on issues. This change allowed Maura and me to focus on building content.

In addition to facing the external challenges of working with an outside vendor, the team faced some internal challenges. I knew this project would require me to add to my technical skills because I had to learn how to use the learning management platform. What I wasn’t anticipating was the need to improve my interpersonal skills. I was surprised at my defensiveness when it came to suggestions about how to organize the knowledge base content I had spent years maintaining on my own. I had to step back and remind myself about what the team as a whole was trying to achieve.

Looking Back to Move Forward

hc1 is all about actionable insights, which means that we provide data to our clients in a way that they can easily use it to improve healthcare delivery. Likewise, the value of a retrospective isn’t just to document work—it’s meant to provide a path for continuous improvement.

As anyone who’s responsible for a customer education platform knows, it is a project that never ends. There’s always something that needs to be added, removed or improved upon. But the lessons learned from the recently launched hc1 Academy project have applications for other areas of work our team does as well, such as:

Making sure we are aligned with our customers. We can’t assume that we have the same expectations or information as they do going into a project.
Allowing time for learning. Curiosity is one of hc1’s core values for a reason. Every project offers an opportunity to learn something new.
Documenting our process. No surprise, the tech writer thinks there should be more documentation. But when I was in the throes of doing the work for this project, even I had to remind myself to stop and jot down a note or two about the decisions I was making to share with the rest of the team. Good documentation helps teams function better.

To learn more about how hc1 Executive Director of Client Success, Jennifer Maxwell, helps hc1 customers improve healthcare through actionable insights, attend one of the hc1 presentations at laboratory events this spring and summer.

If you’d like to collaborate with the hc1 Client Success team, check out hc1’s open positions for software engineers.

Finally, if you are an hc1 customer, have you checked out the new hc1 Academy yet? Let us know what you think.

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Heather Stith is the hc1 senior technical writer. Before joining hc1, she edited dozens of nonfiction and how-to books, helping subject matter experts from a variety of fields share their knowledge with readers.

April 5, 2023

Staffing is one of the biggest challenges facing laboratories of all types. According to a recent survey, only 27% of lab professionals feel their labs are adequately or well-staffed. Among those who felt their labs had staffing issues, only 32% said they were moderately or extremely satisfied with their careers.

Not only are labs having a hard time finding candidates to fill their open positions, but they are also at risk of losing the staff they do have due to dissatisfaction and burnout.

To combat this, labs can look for ways to reduce the burden on staff while still maintaining testing volume and turnaround time targets. Investing in technology is a great way to help staff work more efficiently and focus on more meaningful tasks, while still hitting or even exceeding volume and performance goals.

Here are some steps labs can take to increase productivity and efficiency using technology.

Going digital

As digital technology has rapidly advanced over the past 20–30 years, most labs have transitioned at least some of their functions from manual to electronic, such as orders and results, integrations with analyzers and billing. For example, a recent survey showed that less than 20 percent of labs have moved to electronic processes for inventory/supply chain management and customer service.

Digital solutions greatly reduce the amount of manual, time-consuming tasks required of staff. A customer service representative, for example, can log and track cases and send communications from a single interface with just a few clicks—no paper or data entry is required. Additionally, it is much easier to track activity and analyze data with a digital software solution, compared to manually entering information into spreadsheets. Selecting a system that can ingest data from the LIS and other existing lab systems reduces time spent shifting between systems and provides a single source of truth.

Connecting the lab

The next step for increasing productivity and efficiency is modernizing infrastructure to connect the lab’s various machines and digital systems to one another. This helps eliminate repetitive tasks caused by a lack of communication between systems and devices, reduces the risk of human error and enables easier collaboration across departments or locations.

As Suren Avunjian, CEO of LigoLab, put it, “Human intervention in the laboratory and manual workflow can only take you so far before the potential for mistakes and bottlenecks become major issues and threats to the business. Modern laboratories eliminate this risk by automating core processes and introducing interoperability with analyzers, EHRs, and third-party services like billing companies.”

Automating routine tasks

Automation is another key to taking your lab’s productivity and efficiency to the next level. According to Forrester’s study, “The Lab of the Future is Here”: “The lab of the future is always on. It is automated and connected to the benefit of the (internal or external) customer, the employee, and ultimately the business.”

When routine and administrative tasks are automated, staff are empowered to work at peak capacity on more meaningful work, leaving them more satisfied and less likely to feel burnt out. Automation can also help drive faster turnaround times, leaving providers and patients more satisfied, and enabling labs to take on more volume and grow their business.

Leveraging AI and Machine Learning

Some of the biggest buzzwords today are artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). But for the lab, AI and ML can truly provide significant value. These innovations can further enable labs to automate tasks, reducing the burden on staff, while also optimizing processes to drive superior performance.

AI and ML can also produce predictive analytics that help labs more accurately identify trends and results and act faster on those insights, as well as assist laboratory scientists with analyzing specimens faster and more accurately.

Next Steps

Different labs are going to be at different stages of this technological journey. Whether you’re just starting to digitize your systems and processes or you’re already implementing artificial intelligence and machine learning, the important part is that you’re working toward leveling up your lab and providing a great work environment for your staff.

For more than a decade, hc1 has been here to walk alongside labs for every step of this journey.

The hc1 Lab Insights Platform™ connects your disparate lab data sources on a single platform, helping you leverage the insights within your own data to optimize operations, engage with providers and inform testing and treatment decisions.

hc1 Operations Management™ empowers your teams to collaborate in real-time to uncover meaningful insights, work more efficiently and enhance customer relationships, while hc1 Performance Analytics™ enables you to leverage your vast amount of valuable data to uncover meaningful insights, identify risk signals and deliver proactive service.

Are you ready to take your lab’s productivity and efficiency to the next level? Request a demo today.

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March 1, 2023

It’s 2023 and if you’re an event manager, like me, or you just enjoy networking and meeting people in person, our prayers have been answered! We finally have a full year of in-person event opportunities!

This couldn’t come at a better time for hc1. We have great solutions and need a way to introduce and share them. Getting our sales team in front of the right audience is key. Events allow us to meet with current and potential clients face-to-face and stay on top of industry trends and topics.

Some conferences still continue to look and feel a bit different than pre-COVID events. Several offer hybrid participation options, which doubles the strategy and execution for sponsors and presenters. The same content may resonate with both in-person and virtual audiences, but the presentation, delivery and follow-up are vastly different. It’s much easier to gauge an audience’s reaction when you’re in the same room.

With a solid post-COVID event year under our belt, it was easy to decide where the hc1 team needs to be this year. For 2023, we have a busy schedule of events taking place throughout the country and I couldn’t be more thrilled!

Event sponsorships, cocktail receptions, product theater, speaking sessions and more are all on the docket for us this year. Sponsoring events gets our name out there, but also helps further the great work organizations and individuals are doing in the lab industry. Speaking sessions and product theaters provide us the opportunity to team up with clients and share what they are achieving with hc1 solutions. By sharing our stories, we are able to inform labs about what is possible today. We often host cocktail receptions as a casual environment in which to network and further conversations with hospital, health system and independent lab leaders.

hc1 kicked off 2023 at ASCP KnowledgeLab in Scottsdale, Arizona. Next up for our team is Executive War College (EWC) in New Orleans from April 25–26, where hc1 is a Benefactor Sponsor. This is a premier event for hc1. We have the amazing opportunity to present to leaders of the nation’s most innovative labs not once, not twice, but three times! Our chairman and CEO, Brad Bostic, will present on the main stage and our Executive Director of Client Success, Jennifer Maxwell, will join a Master Class session alongside Zac Zahara, COO of Laboratory Services, MultiCare Health System, and our VP of Data Strategy, Chuck Girard, will conduct a benefactor session presentation with Olivia Choudry, Ph.D., senior partner solutions architect, AWS. In addition, hc1 would love to meet with you there – to request a private meeting time, just complete our meeting request form. It’s going to be an exhilarating few days!

Our team will get a bit of a rest, but we’re right back at it in June as we plan to attend ASCLS LabJAM. Jennifer Maxwell will again take the stage, this time with our friends from Augusta University Medical Center, Department of Pathology—Brooke Whitaker, DCLS, MLS(ASCP)CM, manager, pathology laboratory utilization; manager, microbiology laboratory and Brandy Gunsolus, DCLS, MLS (ASCP) CM, doctor of clinical laboratory science. You’ll also be able to find hc1 in the exhibit hall there.

In July, we’ll be heading to the West Coast for AACC. This is the biggest event we’ll be attending in 2023. With 17,000+ people, hc1 will be one of 750 exhibitors. This event gives us the opportunity to showcase our solutions at our booth and during a product theater session.

In between these in-person events, hc1 will host webinars showcasing our latest lab solutions. Watch our events page at hc1.com/events for more information.

We are so grateful for these opportunities and love sharing what we do with the lab industry. We have a packed schedule for this year and wouldn’t want it any other way. No rest for an innovative company with a lot to share!

Be sure not to miss seeing us at an event—sign up to join our hc1 events mailing list!

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Ginger Hart is the hc1 Events Manager at hc1 since 2021. Prior to joining hc1, Ginger worked in event management in the pharma industry. Before entering healthcare, she served as an Events Manager at Google HQ in Silicon Valley, CA for 11 years. She currently lives in Zionville.

February 23, 2023

You’ve heard the phrase before, knowledge is power, but often knowledge can be perceived as something that should be coveted, not shared. However, quite the opposite is true in relation to the value of sharing knowledge, as identified in the Forbes magazine article, “Knowledge Is Power—And Why You Should Share It”, particularly when it comes to electronic data.

hc1 has an educational webinar for the healthcare community, particularly for leaders of health systems, hospital laboratories and lab stewardship committees, as well as chief medical officers and VPs of ancillary health services, showcasing how real-time lab testing data insights can empower lab leaders to help create efficiencies and improve care by uncovering where provider test ordering habits are not aligning with testing best practices.

Four ways to reveal provider ordering behavior that can reduce costs and improve patient care is presented by hc1 experts, Tawni Reller, MA, BS (MLS, ASCP), product manager, and Adam Sajewich, executive director of high-value care, a 30-minute webinar available now for on-demand viewing by clicking here.

Sajewich opens the webinar with a brief overview of how hc1 has been helping labs for more than 11 years to extend their capabilities by leveraging their data in a HIPAA-compliant, HITRUST-certified cloud environment to overcome the challenges that stand in the way of meeting their goals.

Whether it’s financial data in a billing system, patient data in an EMR or LIS, or timekeeping data––hc1 is an expert in organizing this information that is often siloed in existing systems and enriching it within hc1 to provide a more detailed story that wasn’t necessarily visible before. Bringing these systems and data information into hc1 solutions empowers labs to run more efficiently.

“Labs are in a unique position to provide extraordinary care by tapping into the vast potential energy in their data network in an ecosystem where nearly every clinical and operational decision is driven by data,” Sajewich said. “There’s a significant advantage to be gained with easy access to high-quality lab data from a single source of truth.”

As labs continue to be overwhelmed by supply and staffing shortages and tasked with improving quality of care, healthcare organizations need every opportunity to create efficiencies and improve care, particularly in the lab. Research has shown that approximately 20% of all lab tests are considered unnecessary, resulting in wasted resources and offering room for improvement in care.

Reller, a medical laboratory scientist of more than 25 years established as an expert in the use of quality indicators in both large and small clinical labs, jumps right in addressing four ways the hc1 platform can help reveal provider ordering behavior. She shares common issues prevalent in labs and provides detailed examples and explanations about ways to improve and overcome these obstacles to reveal real-time insights.

The Four Key Areas

Duplicate Detection is the first issue Reller demonstrates using demo hc1 Order Oversight™ dashboards, how more detail and information can be obtained to identify patients receiving repeat testing outside of established guidelines. Next in line is Concurrent Test Detection, comparing the concurrent utilization of specific tests that identify tests that should not be ordered together or monitoring tests that should be ordered together. The third, Encounter Test Frequency––looks at how many tests of a certain type by panel or testing are ordered by patient encounter. Lastly, Provider Ordering Behavior or the number of tests providers actually order by encounter.

With real-time insight into those four ordering patterns, Reller shows how labs can:

Improve quality of care by identifying testing outside guidelines or providers may be ordering outdated tests.
Target change to specific providers, medical groups or health system departments, monitor results, and tie into performance improvement projects whether the lab originates those or the lab data is a contributing factor.
Reduce cost by eliminating duplicate testing which is an across-the-board insight, it can tie into panel orders or profiles where individual tests are being duplicated.
Rein in unnecessary testing to better allocate resources. With the strain on the lab and healthcare workforce, inefficient use of resources is a contributor to unnecessary testing, ie: easier to just duplicate a test vs. trying to track down information supporting the order.

All four of these strategies are unified in supporting a lab’s initiatives in relation to how the data is communicated both internally or externally from the lab.

Key Takeaways

Unchecked overutilization of testing can reduce quality of care and increase costs for the lab, especially as both supplies and staff are lacking in abundance. In addition, the quality of patient care can be impacted in many ways, for instance, by identifying additional testing that may need to be reviewed because it may not provide value toward the patient’s overall care. Therefore, the test may not be necessary.

Health system and lab leaders can improve quality of care and reduce costs by identifying opportunities to align provider ordering habits and best practices. hc1 can provide actionable insights for the lab by tying into EHR, provider ordering systems, order sets and custom order sets by specialty/provider and identifying tests that are not providing patient care value.

Finally, with real-time lab insights, health systems and lab leaders can target change to specific providers, specialties or medical groups and perhaps even the lab itself. The root cause analysis, performance improvement plans, initiation or monitoring are all supported by hc1 insights.

The emphasis in all of these is that the true real-time data is the focus and removes the stigma that may be otherwise attached to individuals, groups or processes within labs and health systems.

To learn more about how your lab and/or health system can benefit from hc1 analytics™ and additionally pairing it hc1 Operations Management™, you can access the webinar, Four ways to reveal provider ordering behavior that can reduce costs and improve patient care in its entirety on-demand, by clicking here.

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Lorri Markum is the marketing manager for hc1 Insights and has over two decades of corporate and nonprofit marketing leadership experience. Lorri specializes in B2B marketing and SEO optimization. Before joining hc1, she was the marketing manager for a nonprofit healthcare organization serving 40 counties throughout Indiana.

February 1, 2023

Sendout testing is one of the largest expenses for labs, from large reference labs and health systems to smaller clinical labs and medical facilities. With some labs spending millions of dollars a year on sendouts across dozens of reference labs while being asked to cut costs wherever possible, it is imperative to closely monitor sendout testing costs and performance.

Here are four steps you can take to improve your lab’s sendout testing process.

1. Standardize where similar lab tests are being sent

Most labs expect to send tests out to multiple different reference labs. Different labs have different specialties, and some may offer better pricing or faster turnaround times than others.

Multi-site organizations—whether a health system or a large commercial lab—face a different challenge. Often, different ordering locations within an organization send the same or similar tests to different reference labs. This can occur due to:

An organization making an acquisition, but leaving operations as-is
Lack of communication between departments or locations
Simply, lack of visibility into the data

Take a look at your sendout data across all your locations and identify any instances where this may be occurring. See if there are opportunities to consolidate where your locations are sending the same or similar tests. Whether you look to achieve the lowest price, the fastest turnaround time or a balance of the two, standardizing your sendout process will help save significant time and effort.

2. Optimize pricing to reduce sendout spend

As mentioned earlier, sendouts are one of the biggest bills in the lab. And with healthcare organizations facing more and more pressure to reduce costs, that sendout bill is a logical place to start.

The first step to optimizing your sendout spending is to analyze all your data across your various reference labs. Identify the reference labs and tests with the highest costs, then work with those vendors to negotiate better rates or move specific tests to another lab with lower prices. Continue to analyze this data over time to ensure you’re always getting optimal prices.

Additionally, you can look internally and identify specific ordering locations or providers with higher-than-expected spending on sendouts. Work with those groups to optimize their test ordering behavior to help reduce spending where possible.

3. Drive accountability on sendout turnaround time

Consistent turnaround time delays can have a significant impact on both patient care and the bottom line, from the inconvenience and added cost of redraws to the loss of partnerships due to missed service level agreements (SLAs).

It is important to regularly monitor turnaround time data for each of your reference labs to ensure they are meeting their SLAs. When they are not, have that data on hand to drive accountability and ensure that your reference labs perform as expected.

4. Assess whether certain sendouts should be brought in-house

With all this data in hand, you are likely to uncover specific sendout tests that cost too much, are not being turned around fast enough or both. If you are unable to drive change through your reference lab to lower costs and/or turnaround times, another option to consider is bringing the tests in-house.

Assess what it would cost to run the specific tests in your lab, factoring in supplies, staffing and any equipment that would need to be purchased. Additionally, determine what a realistic turnaround time would be for your lab to perform the test.

Compare both sets of numbers and, based on your organization’s priorities, make the decision on whether it would be worthwhile to bring the sendout tests in-house.

Next Steps

While the above steps may sound great in theory, many organizations lack the insights they need to make these types of informed decisions on their sendout testing. While reference labs often provide utilization reports with data on the sendouts they receive, each lab sends a different format, the data is not in real-time and there is no way to verify the information.

To overcome these challenges, hc1 has developed a solution to help labs transform their sendout process.

hc1 Sendout Management™ consolidates data across all your reference labs to provide real-time insight into performance and cost to inform operational decisions. Intuitive dashboards include key metrics like volume, total and average spend and turnaround time, enabling lab management to standardize their sendout process, ensure they are getting the best prices and drive accountability on performance benchmarks.

Are you ready to get started on optimizing your sendout process and spending? Request a demo of hc1 Sendout Management today.

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December 20, 2023

A special webinar, now on-demand here, for hc1 Sendout Management™, presented by hc1 experts, reveals background information about hc1’s core platform — hc1 Lab Insights Platform™ comprised of hc1 Analytics™ and hc1 Operations Management™ all of which help inform workflow management, analytics and precision health through easy access, high-quality specific data.

hc1 experts shared information about why Sendout Management was developed and highlighted key features of the solution, noting how this unified platform ensures the ability to monitor sendout TaT to drive accountability and improve care, the ability to optimize pricing to reduce sendout spend and standardizing lab sendout testing processes. “Our goal with Sendout Management was to streamline and standardize sendout data, so lab managers have easy-to-understand reports and dashboards available at their fingertips,” Adam Sajewich, hc1 high value care director, stated.

An introduction and demonstration of the functionality of hc1 Sendout Management in real-time and shows what this solution brings to the hc1 Lab Insights Platform. The ease-of-use dashboards allow both at-a-glance information and quickly accessible, granular information through filter features, such as ordering location type, panel/test name, sendout lab name, ordering provider and more. You can also quickly download and export reports directly from the dashboard. Moyer highlighted the solution’s capability to automate and deliver KPIs or dashboards and send them to decision-makers instantly to empower strategic changes.

Sendout testing is one of the most significant expenses clinical and health system labs experience today, but sendout testing hardships aren’t new, as noted in the 2009 article, “Explosive Growth of Send Out Testing: Can We Curb the Monster?”, published by AACC. With more than 7 billion clinical lab tests performed in the U.S. each year providing critical data, the challenge to meet the demands placed on laboratory staff and health systems is extreme. hc1 Sendout Management helps labs gain the insights they need to assess reference labs’ performance regarding sendout testing, hold them accountable to SLAs and find the best price.

“Managing Sendout Testing is one of the top requests we [hc1] have received from our customers [and the market] over the past five years. In conjunction with increasing costs and the lab staffing crisis, the lack of transparency and standardization has made it more important than ever to bring our hc1 Sendout Management solution to the market to serve our customers, providers, and patients alike,” presenter John Moyer, hc1 sr. product director said.

Attendees asked great questions:

“How does hc1 determine if performing labs are meeting the SLA TaT?”
“How is sendout cost, per test, derived to calculate total sendout spend?”
“What if we have multiple sites using different LISs or EMRs, how would hc1 handle that?”
“What if our lab uses miscellaneous tests per sendouts? Can we still track those?”
“Do you calculate the cost per test in an organization or would this information be provided?”
“What is the typical lead time from the signed contract to the launch of this product for a customer?”

Watch on-demand here, learn the answers to the above questions, and see the complete webinar.

hc1 Sendout Management is available to both new and existing customers. Contact us today to get started if you would like a custom demo.

hc1 was built from the ground up for healthcare and is cloud-based, allowing better cross-communication and access to data within a health system. We were made to enhance labs and are 100% tailored for healthcare. Our solutions help you realize the value in your data from billing codes, naming conventions, diagnosis codes, ICD-10 codes, specimen IDs and more.

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November 28, 2023

In the recent article “Why Big Data Science and Data Analytics Projects Fail,” Data Science Process Alliance consultant Nick Hotz outlines common problems all data project teams face and the questions that need to be answered for a data project to succeed. Since 2011, hc1 has been helping health systems and laboratories analyze their laboratory testing data to improve patient care. Our approach to resolving data project problems for our customers is rooted in our core values. I spoke with hc1 data scientist Alex Karr, for more details about this approach.

Hire curious people and develop their talents

Hotz mentions the difficulty of finding people with the appropriate data skills in today’s competitive market. What he doesn’t say is that organizations can choose to invest in developing the skills of the people they already have. Karr is a great example of this kind of career growth. He started with hc1 as an intern writing training documentation for our business intelligence team. When he was hired full-time, he learned to write queries and develop reports as an analyst. He then used his deep knowledge of the hc1 database to move into a data engineering role with the data team to manage their ETL (extract, transform, load) processes. While continuing to work at hc1, Karr earned his master’s degree in data science and was promoted to his current position.

“For me, the natural progression was we’ve got all this data, how do we actually make insights out of it? Of course, one way is doing visualizations for a client, but what I was more interested in was machine learning, so, you know, how can we make predictions based on what we have,” Karr said.

Be accountable for data quality

As the Data Science Process Alliance article points out, not having the right data is the clearest reason for data project failure. “Not having the right data is pretty critical, because we can work with what we’ve got, but it’s always gonna have limitations. We have to make sure that we recognize those limitations and try to account for them, ” Karr said. He explained some of the ways we do this:

Integrating data from multiple sources. Lab testing data comes from systems that are designed to collect the information necessary for reimbursement, not operational or patient care improvement, so there are likely to be gaps in the information that can be gleaned from it. For example, we might need to look at medical claims data to get full diagnosis information or add financial data to present a complete picture of lab operations.
Cleaning data. Our patient matching process de-duplicates patient records so that we can build data models from a more manageable, performant dataset. Standardizing the format of zip code and state data points, for example, is important in public and population health use cases that involve patient geography, such as evaluating the risk of COVID-19 spread or tracking changes in opioid overdoses.

Standardizing test names and abbreviations and comparing test codes, analytes, and units of measure to determine whether tests with similar names are in fact referring to the same test is an essential part of making sure that the insights we provide for test utilization and order volume are accurate.

Evaluating data for bias. When compared with U.S. Census data, our dataset reveals a slight overrepresentation of women, for example. Knowing that fact allows our data scientists to adjust data models to reflect patient gender ratios that align with U.S. population numbers.

At this point in the interview, Karr started getting into concepts that reminded me that not all hc1 technical writers (namely me) are destined to become data scientists. He spoke about imputation and overfitting and data leakage. Mostly, I understood that a major part of building a machine learning model is figuring out which data points to include and which ones to exclude, a process called feature selection. He also stressed that it’s important to separate your training data from your testing data.

Use a collaborative project management process

The Hotz article lists ineffective project management processes as a reason for data project failure and recommends the Agile methodology, which is what the hc1 technology department uses, as a solution. As hc1 practices it, Agile means small, focused teams of product owners, software engineers, business and data analysts, and data scientists work together in two-week-long sprints to complete defined blocks of work. Breaking up the work in this way provides the flexibility to incorporate customer feedback and adjust to changing priorities. It also shortens the amount of time required to deliver value. Frequent communication and collaboration are essential to making the Agile process work, as is keeping the focus on the problem the customer is trying to solve. Although data science doesn’t often fall neatly into defined deliverables—many sprints are devoted to research—Karr finds the structure and clear goals of Agile to be helpful, especially when he splits his time among different teams and projects.

Handle data ethically

As a healthcare technology company, hc1 safeguards the protected health information in our systems in accordance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).

hc1 was founded on the belief that every patient should be treated as a unique individual and that if labs could organize every individual’s information intelligently, they could personalize and improve care for all patients. Now, hc1 solutions optimize laboratory operations for thousands of locations and inform testing and treatment decisions for millions of patients. Click here to learn more about the hc1 Platform which has organized diagnostic data for over 200 million patients and processes more than 30 billion clinical transactions and 500 million test results per month.

October 11, 2022

Laboratory testing plays a decisive role in the early detection, diagnosis and treatment of disease in patients and is the single highest-volume medical activity performed in the U.S., with more than 7 billion tests conducted annually, according to the American Clinical Laboratory Association. Test orders aren’t always perfect, however. Often, a duplicate or unnecessary test is ordered or a needed test is omitted, which can negatively impact the quality of care a patient receives.

Lab Stewardship has emerged as a strategy to assure quality in laboratory medicine to provide the right test for the right patient at the right time. The American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) refers to lab stewardship as correctly ordering, retrieving and interpreting lab results. Errors in these three aspects of the total testing process are the culprits for most diagnostic errors and are the cause of the majority of significant patient harm in malpractice litigations.

On September 21, 2022, Quest Diagnostics, in collaboration with hc1, hosted a virtual webinar on the importance of Lab Stewardship entitled How to Close Gaps in Care by Maximizing the Power of Laboratory Stewardship Solutions.

Experts, Donna D. Cooper, MS, MBA, Sr. Director, Health Systems Product Solutions, Quest Diagnostics and James Haarbauer, MS, Sr. Business Intelligence Consultant, hc1, shared their lab stewardship strategies for hospitals and health systems including:

The 4 basic elements of an effective Laboratory Stewardship program
Key criteria when building a Laboratory Stewardship Committee
3 ways lab stewardship solutions improve patient care and outcomes
How to identify low-impact versus high-impact interventions

“Lab stewardship is the opportunity to manage hospital and laboratory resources in a way that provides optimal information to clinicians while reducing costs to patients, hospitals, and health systems,” said Cooper, “Effective committees need a balance of three qualities in order to be successful–Influencers, Informers and Doers.”

Cooper went on to provide details on how to form a solid lab stewardship committee and the importance of governance, intervention, and pipeline from a granular approach. “Getting the right people at the table is critical to the success of any Lab Stewardship Committee,” said Cooper.

Lab Stewardship also requires lab data insights that can be cumbersome to interpret in identifying areas of concern for the health systems they support. However, “the burden of deciphering lab data can be removed from the medical and lab leadership with just an LIS connection––health systems can begin using hc1 dashboards to identify the greatest improvement opportunities by test, location and provider,” said Haarbauer.

Quest Lab Stewardship powered by hc1 empowers health systems to maximize the utility of their laboratories with intuitive analytics and advisory services that provide actionable insights into laboratory testing trends that can identify missed opportunities to deliver the right test to the right patient at the right time.

One of the questions posed by attendees during the webinar’s question and answer session was whether it is easy to access the lab stewardship platform. Cooper explained, “There are two ways to access the lab stewardship platform in a system. Quest offers tiered access through the Reference Platform to allow users to see data on any test that is sent through Quest. The Enterprise Platform allows users to establish an interface with hc1 and will be able to enter data for all in-house testing as well as testing sent to Quest or any laboratory so users will have a full picture of all testing information.”

To learn more in-depth information that was shared, you can view the webinar on-demand by clicking here.

Author: hc1