Clinical Lab 2.0: Data Driven Strategies that Position Labs to Compete in the Changing Healthcare Landscape

Summary: Clinical Lab 2.0 facilitates thought leadership efforts to identify opportunities and threats that provide insight into laboratory operations and identify value streams to drive efficiency for the laboratory, health systems and positive outcomes for patients.

Clinical Lab 2.0 is all about the future of capturing new customers, partners and markets.  For laboratories to compete, new approaches, models and new thinking backed by the data-driven insights are needed. These new alternative markets such as non-payer regulated revenue (e.g., pay for service), or pay at time of service in direct to consumer models, participate within patient engagement when treated as a consumer. By actively developing a patient-friendly model, laboratories participate and take an active role in patient engagement strategies and while developing new revenue opportunities.  This puts the lab within the strategic nativities of the hospital as it competes for patients in their communities. 

The primary focus of Clinical Lab 2.0 is determining how labs are able to remain competitive and capture new lines of business, all while investing in innovation.  The future of laboratories is dependent on flexibility and the investment in strategies for laboratory information and information technology.  Innovation in pathology and diagnostics, for example, requires that labs focus on their individual core competencies while investigating new opportunities to improve their financial health.  Innovation for the purpose of innovation is good but innovation for the purpose of identifying new revenue models that benefit the laboratory is better.

At the Clinical Lab 2.0 conference hosted this week by Project Santa Fe Foundation, XiFin CEO and Executive Chairman, Lâle White emphasized that for the lab to be competitive in the changing healthcare landscape, lab leadership needs to not only take a seat at the table but also convene the table to be a system asset with high value.  Value that begins with a data strategy.  Labs will need to take a different view of their data to define a strategy to utilize their data into an integrated healthcare approach for health optimization, risk assessment around reduction of negative outcomes, care coordination, and evidence-based models and finally, payment models.  

Strategies for laboratories in the current environment will require an open, flexible and innovative approach to succeed in the current healthcare environment.  Strategies that include, but are not limited to, adoption of information technologies, informatics approaches and most importantly “insights” to link people, processes and data position laboratories to elevate and establish their value in the current healthcare environment.  Clinical Lab 2.0 is about awareness and education allowing for a beginning of the process and evolution from Clinical Lab 1.0 status quo to Clinical Lab 2.0 innovation.  After all, the process is evolutionary, not revolutionary.