Hospital Labs
“Laboratory “today is a Super Specialized area with diversified specialties. Outsourcing laboratory management in hospitals to external referral laboratories is a relatively new phenome-non in India.
HM enables hospitals to offer patients the best diagnostic care available without diverting their focus from core healthcare services. By sparing them the effort to manage yet another department, it turns out to be a cost-effective solution as well. The referral lab works like their full-fledged department and carries out a wide range of clinical lab tests.
Need for Managed Laboratories :
Labs within hospitals, though being an integral part of medical services, are often neglected.
A Laboratory requires expertise from different fields like Haematology, Clinical Pathology, Histopathology, Genetics, Molecular Biology, Microbiology etc. It is often difficult to find and engage appropriate man-power from all these areas at one place.
Technologies, workload, skill sets are key factors for running a laboratory in a cost effective manner.
The cost of testing is inversely proportional to the workload and directly proportional to other overheads.
The laboratory is just one of the many departments in the hospital and hence does not get enough attention from hospital management. This results in high inventory and costs, pilferage, inadequate quality / service turn-around-time causing dissatisfaction amongst Clinicians and patients.
More effective and efficient utilization of automation and other sophisticated analytical technology is possible with a professionally managed reference laboratory.