The Profit Machine In The Hospital Basement

Discover the incredible opportunity for hospital-based laboratories to outreach into the community, compete with national laboratories, and drop an additional $2-20 million dollars or more to the bottom line. No more is the laboratory a forgotten department in the hospital basement! Using success stories as the basis for this book, Dr. Kathleen Murphy proves that outreach IS a veritable profit machine to drive new revenue and margins for health systems. Most clinical laboratories utilize less than 30 percent of laboratory capacity on a 24/7 basis. Yet, few know that increasing outreach volume will lower unit costs by up to 50 percent. Discover how outreach will help improve quality, service, and population health management for all patient types: inpatient, outpatient, and outreach alike. Does this sound too good to be true? Outreach offers all this and more. Nonetheless, today most hospitals and systems do not leverage their laboratory anywhere near the extent possible. You ve invested millions in sophisticated equipment and automation to provide quick turnaround time on results for inpatients. You ve created a mean, lean production machine that runs at capacity for as little as three hours a day. The power of outreach comes from leveraging sunk cost in facilities, equipment, and staff. No, it s not too complicated, non-core, or non-profitable. Don t believe the myths, propagated by the competition, that you can t compete with the likes of Quest and LabCorp. At a time of unprecedented declines in revenue and reimbursement, clinical laboratory outreach brings material value to health systems looking for new sources of income.

Kathleen A. Murphy, PhD, is a laboratory scientist turned executive and entrepreneur. The Profit Machine in the Hospital Basement: Turning Your Lab into an Economic Engine is her first book. Kathy is the former chief executive officer of Chi Solutions, Inc., now an Accumen Company, a clinical laboratory management and consulting firm. She now serves as the Senior Growth Advisor in the new organization. Chi Solutions is founded on the principle that hospitals can compete with large national and regional laboratories through consolidation, regionalization, and outreach. Every laboratory has spare capacity that it can leverage to secure additional test volume from the community. With a competitive offering in place, laboratory outreach programs that are operated and financed as serious business entities can match or outpace Quest Diagnostics, LabCorp, and similar competitors. An early adopter of the laboratory outreach strategy, Kathy started two successful programs in Boston in the 1980s and 1990s. By sharing more than three decades of knowledge about running a profitable outreach business, she has devoted her career to teaching hospitals how to commercialize their laboratories to capture new revenue and counteract declining reimbursements. Kathy s personal interests include gardening, photography, travel, and volunteer work. She serves on the Board of Trustees and the Foundation Board for her undergraduate alma mater, Salem State University in Salem, Massachusetts.