Outreach Implementation Requirements: A Case Study

A variety of methods have been designed to reduce cost per procedure, which include increased test volume through hospital laboratory mergers, consolidation, and integration and/or development of an outreach program that markets laboratory services to physician offices, nursing homes, and other hospitals. An intrapreneur must convert the illusion of revenue consisting of clad coinage created by delusional, magical thinking to a coherent outreach program generating genuine profits. Numerous potential barriers may be encountered during a change process, including myths, active inertia, lack of incentive, insufficient support from financial analysis and other groups, a slow approval process, conflicting visions, and others. This chapter describes the implementation of a hospital-based clinical laboratory outreach program, Beaumont Reference Laboratory (BRL), and its affiliation with a regional hospital laboratory network, Joint Venture Hospital Laboratories (JVHL), to secure provider status with major local and regional insurance carriers. A section of the chapter reviews the development of the sales and marketing department, as well as courier services for BRL. The chapter shows how BRL built success through affiliation with JVHL. The key factor to success in this network affiliation is the ability of the laboratory network to win provider status for its members with the major managed-care organizations. The implementation of the outreach program led to many benefits, including using spare capacity and thus achieving economies of scale, generating a new revenue stream, lowering unit costs, enhancing the test menu, and creating a new avenue for customer (physician) bonding.