Laboratory stewardship is essential in this era of value-based care. ARUP Healthcare Advisory Services has taken it one step further by looking at how the lab can also affect one of the highest-cost items in healthcare: pharmacy.

10%–30% of lab tests are unnecessarily or inappropriately ordered.

10%–30% of lab tests are unnecessarily or inappropriately ordered.

 

~7% of patients experience adverse drug effects, increasing hospital costs by 1.9% and drug costs by 15%.

~7% of patients experience adverse drug effects, increasing hospital costs by 1.9% and drug costs by 15%.

 

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Choosing Wisely Award

What’s the Advantage of Working With ARUP?

We’ve been helping clients optimize their testing through utilization management best practices for more than 20 years, and we’ve helped establish hospital and systemwide lab stewardship programs for the last decade.

  1. As a reference lab and a hospital lab, we have firsthand knowledge of industry trends.
  2. More than 100 medical directors keep us up to date on the clinical utility of tests.
  3. Our evidence-based recommendations are supported by powerful data analytics.

Our lab consulting team won two 2021 American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP) Choosing Wisely Awards for driving effective lab test utilization to reduce overuse or waste in medicine, cut healthcare costs, and improve patient care.

Where Do I Begin?

An effective laboratory stewardship program goes beyond data analysis and extends into continual improvement and cultural adaptation. By creating a lab stewardship program, you can help your hospital or health system eliminate waste, reduce costs, and improve patient care.

Our healthcare consultant will help:

  • Analyze your data for opportunities
  • Establish a governance structure
  • Apply evidenced-based guidelines based on our analysis
  • Prioritize interventions and identify next steps
  • Create a structure to assess and maintain the program

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Unpack the Data to Reveal Opportunities

Whether it’s the last piece of the puzzle or the start of your stewardship journey, our 12-month analysis identifies your top opportunities for improvement and the associated cost savings without putting a strain on your valuable IT resources.

This comprehensive inpatient report finds:

  • Duplicate testing
  • Unnecessary repeat testing or inappropriate testing intervals
  • Reflex testing
  • Misordered or misutilized testing

Explore Pharmacy Stewardship to Further Reduce Costs and Improve Patient Care

Appropriate laboratory testing can positively influence pharmacy utilization, helping health systems improve patient care and achieve cost savings. You can maximize the value your laboratory brings to the health system with the following strategies:

Pharmacy
Collaborate With Pharmacy
  • Standardize workflow and practices
  • Enhance opioid and antibiotic stewardship
  • Align budget planning
  • Enhance continuity of care
Assist With Therapeutic Drug Monitoring
  • Optimize drug dosing for individual patients
  • Prevent ineffective drug therapy
  • Decrease time to therapeutic results
  • Reduce pharmacy costs
  • Improve patient safety
Integrate Pharmacogenetics (PGx)
  • Understand and improve patient response to treatment
  • Deliver the right drug and right dose at the right time
  • Improve patient care
  • Decrease the number of adverse medication-related events

Whichever way you choose to approach your pharmacy stewardship initiatives, our experienced pharmacy and healthcare consultants can guide you through the process.

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Standardize Point-of-Care Testing

Help your providers order the right test at the right time with standardized order sets. This systemwide opportunity reduces variation in care, promotes patient safety, and reduces costs associated with unnecessary testing.

Let our healthcare consultants help you:

  • Develop a governing committee
  • Perform an initial analysis of order sets
  • Provide guidance for the committee to create standardized processes going forward
  • Establish metrics to quantify improvement

Conserve Limited Blood Resources

Blood utilization management is a critical aspect of preserving limited and often critical blood resources, and studies show hospitals with a robust blood utilization program reduce excessive ordering patterns by 20%–30%, potentially saving upwards of $250,000 per year.

Our Healthcare Advisory Services team will help:

  • Establish a collaborative committee to identify opportunities
  • Standardize workflow and identify ordering opportunities with evidence-based best practices and Choosing Wisely guidelines
  • Develop a proactive communication plan to address blood utilization management efforts
  • Establish metrics to quantify improvement