Improving Healthcare Delivery Amid a Changing Clinical Lab Environment

This webinar is hosted by GenomeWeb and sponsored by Thermo Fisher Scientific. The webinar was recorded on July 18, 2019.

Speaker: Robert Carpenter, Senior Healthcare Consultant, ARUP Laboratories
Speaker: Chris Rapcan, Director, Lifecylcle Management, Quality Controls, Thermo Fisher Scientific
Duration: 1 hour

Overview:

This webinar will explore the concept of laboratory stewardship as a way of viewing and improving healthcare delivery, through the consistent and persistent search for ways to increase testing efficiency and effectiveness, decrease waste, and therefore improve patient care quality.

Learning Objectives:

  • Understand and be prepared to incorporate the concept of laboratory stewardship as a tool for improving patient care.
  • Review and discuss examples and case studies where stewardship interventions have resulted in significant savings and patient care improvements.
  • Go forward with a commitment to find and act upon stewardship opportunities in your own organization.

The old model for clinical laboratory testing focused largely on a fee-for-service reimbursement environment, where additional volume always translated to additional revenue, and tests were relatively inexpensive. Many laboratorians exerted little influence on provider test utilization practices and opted to simply perform whatever tests the provider ordered, whenever they were ordered. As a result, and not surprisingly, patterns of overutilization, underutilization, and mis-utilization of tests emerged and persisted.

This presentation supports a new model of laboratory service delivery, where laboratory leaders assume new roles of greater involvement and influence in the selection and performance of tests, as part of a collaborative team effort that crosses departmental boundaries. This concept and process has been referred to in recent literature as “laboratory stewardship” and has been the basis for significant patient care improvements in many laboratories. It fits perfectly within the new environment of accountable care organizations, rapid growth of expensive genetic tests, and the ongoing desperate attempts to control healthcare costs.  It also fits well with efforts to improve lab testing efficiency and productivity, through the careful selection of QC materials and testing platforms.

This webinar will demonstrate, through example and case study, several ways most laboratories, organizations, and patients can benefit greatly from the laboratory stewardship approach. It will emphasize the need to adopt a collaborative proactive approach to healthcare delivery, recognizing that the clinical laboratory is positioned uniquely to exercise considerable positive influence to this effort.

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CE credit not available for this webinar.

Robert Carpenter biography

Robert Carpenter
Senior Healthcare Consultant
ARUP Laboratories

Rob Carpenter holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from the University of Illinois, certification as a Medical Technologist (ASCP), and a Master of Science degree in Laboratory Management from Brigham Young University. His 45 years of clinical laboratory experience include Administrative Laboratory Director positions at Children’s Hospital Colorado and Poudre Valley Hospital, numerous other clinical laboratory leadership, management, and consultative roles, several Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria teams, and the facilitation of multiple major laboratory construction projects.

He currently resides in Chandler, Arizona, and holds a position of Senior Healthcare Consultant at ARUP Laboratories. He has presented and consulted regionally and nationally on the topics of laboratory stewardship, laboratory networking, outreach testing, leadership, compliance, regulatory issues, and laboratory financial management. His consistent passion is the development and encouragement of principle-centered leadership and the promotion of value-added and patient-centered service excellence in the clinical laboratory.

Chris Rapcan biography

Chris Rapcan
Director, Lifecycle Management, Quality Controls
Thermo Fisher Scientific

Chris Rapcan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from Illinois State University and has over 16 years in clinical laboratory industry with multiple 3rd Party Quality Control providers. He has extensive experience in supporting validations, verifications and quality control programs for chemistry, molecular, oncology and blood donor screening.

Currently Chris is supporting the Thermo Fisher Scientific strategy for their Quality Controls business in developing key products for laboratories to become more efficient with their QC practices and finding ways to reduce overall operational costs through more productive solutions. His consistent passion for improving laboratory productivity and standardized patient care is what is driving him and Thermo Fisher Scientific to provide the most consolidated, characterized quality control products on the market for clinical laboratories.

Robert Carpenter

Robert Carpenter
Senior Healthcare Consultant
ARUP Laboratories

Chris Rapcan

Chris Rapcan
Director, Lifecycle Management
Quality Controls
Thermo Fisher Scientific