Home Forums Discussions General Discussion In office lab

Anyone running an in office lab? Can you be kind enough to message me?

Thanks.

Done.

I am also interested in hearing about running your own lab in office. Is this a good source of revenue or just a service to your patients?

We have a CBC machine and Siemens Dimension chemistry analyzer. We started our lab over 10 years ago, thinking that we could both capture some of the income we sent to the national labs and also create a comfortable environment for patients. In retrospect, I think we would be losing money on the lab without our special circumstances, such as having a part time Laboratory Technologist, who would rather work for us for less than the $22 an hour paid by the hospital or commercial labs. So I am not really recommending that anyone start up with a physician office lab (POL) without really looking at what labs you order, whether the insurance that you participate with will cover POL, and especially whether you can support the salary of a Laboratory Technologist.

We are doing this analysis now.

You can get all your data from the local labs regarding what you are ordering and how many. Just call them or speak to your local rep.

There is CLIA waived and CLIA moderately complex (OK, there is CLIA BIG TIME, but I doubt any docs are running that out of their office)
The rules are a lot tighter on moderately complex and many of the things you want are in the waived catagory: Hgb, strep screen, UCG, U/A dips are all done in our office
HgbA1C, Cholesterol, mono spot, Influenza screens, Lead levels are also available in waived form but we do not run them.
While we do not make a lot of money on the tests, it allows us to make clinical decisions quickly. The profit margin is not large enough to do it strictly for the money.

The same Medical Assistants that take vitals and put patients in the room also do the testing, so we do not have separate Lab Tech fees. There is little additional labor overhead.