Tag Archives: Laboratory purchasing/budgeting

July 2022—A time of tough choices. A complex dance. This is how Compass Group members on a call with their colleagues, led by CAP TODAY publisher Bob McGonnagle, describe what it’s like to cover outpatient centers amid severe staff shortages. “We are consuming significant resources to get all our locations staffed,” one member says. Another predicts: “We will not be out of this staffing situation for 10 years.” Here is more of what they and others talked about on June 7 as COVID positivity rates were up and monkeypox was in the news. The Compass Group is an organization of not-for-profit IDN system laboratory leaders who collaborate to identify and share best practices and strategies.

April 2022—Staffing, supply chain, and significant supply price increases. Two continuing problems and one new. When Compass Group members met online March 1 with CAP TODAY publisher Bob McGonnagle, that trio of issues took center stage. Here’s what they had to say.

January 2022—“Still a pressure cooker and hotter now” and “grim.” Two comments that describe where some states were on Dec. 7 when Compass Group members met for their monthly call on COVID-19 and more—and this was before omicron spread in the United States.

December 2021—The staffing crisis lives on, despite labs having plans of all kinds in place to alleviate the shortage. “It’s the only thing we’re talking about,” Ochsner Health’s Greg Sossaman, MD, said on Nov. 2 when members of the Compass Group met by Zoom. SARS-CoV-2 testing and test supplies and vaccination are “taking a back seat” to staffing, he said.

July 2021—Revenue and growth, cybersecurity, and labor and wage pressures were on minds June 1 when Compass Group members met virtually with CAP TODAY publisher Bob McGonnagle. But perhaps no problem felt heavier than the labor shortage.

May 2019—CAP Press released this month its second edition of Laboratory Administration for Pathologists, first published in 2011. It covers management of personnel, laboratory space, pathology information systems, and quality in laboratory medicine and in the anatomic pathology lab. That’s just to start. Among its other chapters: patient safety, the pathology position, lab laws and regulations, legal affairs, ethics, and financial management of the lab and of the pathology practice. And there is more in the 296-page book edited by Elizabeth A. Wagar, MD, Michael B. Cohen, MD, Donald S. Karcher, MD, and Gene P. Siegal, MD, PhD. CAP TODAY recently asked Dr. Wagar about the latest edition; what she told us appears here, along with an excerpt (at right). Dr. Wagar is professor and chair, Department of Laboratory Medicine, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

June 2014—If they made disaster movies about the laboratory industry, you could cue the voice talent right now, because all the plot elements seem ready at hand. In a world where an economy haltingly recovers from the blows of recession, a series of double-digit reimbursement cuts for laboratory services looms. New financial accounting standards lurk in the background, threatening to roil traditional equipment rental arrangements. A mammoth national health insurance program rolls out, generating fears of one set of dictates to rule them all.