Laboratory Advisory Services
Understand how to repair operational weaknesses, identify opportunities, and create growth for your lab.
Strong, sustainable growth and results hinge on your lab’s ability to build and act on strategies that span operations, leadership, and customer engagement.
If even one detail isn’t working optimally, it can damage your entire organization. On the other hand, if your lab has a holistic, detailed sense of how multiple organizational elements are working, both on their own and together, you have the engine for continuous improvement.
Colaborate lab consultants have decades of experience creating and sustaining high functioning labs. Working closely with each client, we perform comprehensive operational assessments across facilities, workflow, menu offerings, equipment, leadership, market outreach, fee schedules, and billing and collections.
Colaborate Advisory Services
Sustain high functioning business operations, ensure compliance with ever-changing regulations, pursue growth and investment, and benefit from regular laboratory analysis and planning.
Financial Operations Support
Facing marketplace issues, shifting practice patterns, reimbursement demands, and complex regulations most labs are forced to take their focus off work they’re in business to do. Colaborate helps you manage risks and uncertainties, and put reliable financial processes in place, so you can have confidence that your financial operations are sound and your lab is positioned for stability.
We work as your partner and lab management guide so you can establish financial, strategic, and operational structures to support a successful, growing business.
- Accounts Receivable
- Billing Management
- Buy/Sell Transactions
- Compensation Analysis
- Laboratory Management
- Molecular Testing
- Outreach Development
- Revenue Cycle
Facilities Use Optimization
Hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare facilities are expensive, and physical space is often limited. As a result, your organization likely faces pressure to show how your assets are being used to the highest potential. Colaborate helps hospital systems and healthcare organizations around the country to design, develop, relocate, expand, and contract laboratory space for optimal spend and use.
Information Technology Optimization
Information technology (IT) deployment, integration, and management require detailed planning and resourcing, and careful oversight. Colaborate helps laboratories to ensure their IT systems remain on budget and working hard. Our experienced, knowledgeable team connects disparate systems, analyzes and integrates the most appropriate solutions for each client, and keeps laboratory IT systems running smoothly and securely.
On-site Marketing and Sales Support
Colaborate can provide the necessary on-site support to raise the level of success in your marketing and sales programming.
Performance Improvement Review
Colaborate will conduct a thorough lab outreach program review to identify areas for continued performance improvement.
Chargemaster Review and Confirmation
Laboratories have to stay abreast of yearly changes to CPT codes and the continuous changes to laboratory tests and methodologies. One incorrect CPT code or irrational pricing could cost thousands in lost revenue. Colaborate’s industry-focused experts provide comprehensive laboratory compliance assessment, chargemaster, pricing, and test utilization reviews:
- Laboratory compliance assessments and chargemaster CPT code review confirms all active billable tests in the laboratory information system (LIS) are mapped accurately to a correct CPT code line item
- Pricing analysis confirms that test billing fees are rational
- Test utilization analysis determines whether the top 30 tests appear to follow a reasonable ordering pattern
Laboratory Compliance and Billing Advisory Services
Staying current with application and integration of laboratory compliance and industry billing practices burdens most hospitals, independent commercial laboratories, and contract billing companies. Ongoing regulatory demands can be a distraction for the organization. But not paying sufficient attention to the requirements can result in organizational misinterpretations, management team paralysis, unnecessary costs, loss of revenue and legal exposure.
Colaborate addresses your immediate and long-term compliance and billing needs. We help you focus on the areas of greatest concern to improve services and profitability in the short-term, and maintain a reasonably priced, effectivecompliance program over many years – even as requirements continue to change.
Laboratory Compliance Audit Assessment
Gain insight into and control of every aspect of compliance issues, including coding and billing practices. A Colaborate laboratory compliance audit assessment is a prospective review of 135 regulatory issues. It is comprehensive, participative, and geared to withstand federal scrutiny. In addition, we help you build controls around marketing and operational interfaces between referring physicians, contract hospitals, and pathology billing areas.
Our audit assessment includes interviews with selected staff, a review of selected policies and procedures, and an evaluation of CAP laboratory-related practices in the laboratory departments approved for testing. We present results and recommendations in an actionable ‘report card’ format that shows performance levels related to compliance with accreditation and regulatory standards.
Mock Laboratory CLIA / CAP / The Joint Commission Inspection
Ensure a successful outcome in the mandatory bi-annual CLIA / CAP / The Joint Commission Inspection. A mock laboratory inspection prepares you by identifying and rectifying any deficiencies that could jeopardize your licensure in one or more testing areas, severely hindering your ability to provide service and patient care.
A Colaborate mock inspection will:
- Identify any areas of laboratory operation that do not meet the standards required for CAP accreditation (e.g., compliance deficiencies)
- Identify areas of laboratory operation that are marginal and in jeopardy of failing accreditation standards
- Provide recommendations to meet CAP accreditation standards
Market Growth Consulting
Colaborate supports clients working to develop or expand laboratory outreach programs. Our experience-based, methodical approach helps you to launch the near-term growth areas, as well as to put the pieces in place to achieve long-term opportunities. We begin by evaluating your current capabilities and market opportunity. With that baseline, we help you isolate operational gaps you need to address before pursuing expansion and assess the investment necessary to develop your identified market opportunity.
Strategic Growth Planning
A well-conceived strategic plan considers the immediate business environment, three- and five-year checkpoints, and examines future trends. That level of insight takes careful research and an objective sense of strengths, opportunities, weaknesses, and threats. Colaborate can help you develop a strategic business plan that positions your lab to compete and satisfy client needs, so you can expand revenue and grow your business over the coming years.
Venue Capital Advisory
Over decades of experience as laboratory consultants, Colaborate has built a strong working knowledge of lending sources, M&A strategies and processes, and relationships with important venture capitalists. We can respond quickly. Clients turn to us to determine the valuation and viability of a potential investment or acquisition and perform due diligence in an efficient, expert manner.
- Billing and collections (compliance review)
- Borrowing base calculations
- Client opportunity and risk review
- Expense reduction opportunity (supplies, facilities, etc.)
- Facilities assessment and risks
- Leadership assessment (management)
- Liability exposure analysis
- Market opportunity assessment
- Proforma viability
- Revenue opportunity and exposure
- Staffing assessment and recommendation (labor and productivity benchmarking)
- Systems/IT review
Joint Venture Advisory
The laboratory sector is vibrant with acquisition and joint venture opportunities. Pursuing an acquisition by a publicly traded company or venture fund investment, however, requires extensive analysis. Colaborate will help you assess your potential for sale, consolidation, or joint venture, and to identify risk factors so you can improve your position for an optimal investment scenario.
Laboratory Planning
Strategic planning is the key to a successful operation. For more than 25 years, Colaborate laboratory planning professionals have assisted labs with design and equipment planning, market assessment, sales and marketing development, and more.
Core Lab Analysis and Development
As health systems begin to grasp the promising dynamics of their laboratories, how you develop a core laboratory becomes an important consideration. Colaborate has decades of experience with the structure and function of clinical and hospital-based laboratories. We have used that knowledge to help numerous troubled, under performing, and failing core laboratories to create dramatic and long-lasting changes. Our comprehensive approach covers analysis, development, and implementation of organizational and fiscal improvements.
Process Change / New Process Implementation
Make sure your process implementations and changes are seamless and efficient. Colaborate will work with your lab, information systems, and financial teams to make the most appropriate updates, from orders/results, specimen tracking, billing, marketing and customer service, to seamless physician office EMR interfaces.
Outreach Vendor Selection
Maximize the value of your IT investments. Acting as an extension of your information systems team, Colaborate will take you through every step of scoring and selecting the right vendor and negotiating discounts during the contract phase (often offsetting related fees and services). Once selected, we help you install and test the new software solutions, ensure seamless interfacing, train users, and automate processes.
Client Connectivity
Raising the quality and efficiency of connectivity can improve client relationships, enable you to compete against national laboratories, and secure compliance with government regulations. Transitioning existing outreach programs into the new client connectivity environment is a detailed process that requires structured guidance. Colaborate will facilitate the planning, selection, and implementation processes for client connectivity, including acquiring the product suite that fits your needs best.
Together, we can put the right people, processes, and capabilities in place to create sustainable success for your lab.
“Colaborate is the firm to select when you want more than just a PowerPoint of recommendations.”
- System CEO | High Value Recommendations