RICH PARSONS, Principal Director of Management & Operations Consulting
HFS Consultants has developed a tool that can quickly evaluate operating performance in any hospital department. We can compare your hospital’s cost performance to virtually every other hospital in the state of California.
Using the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) Annual Financial Disclosure Reports, we have developed a method to determine productivity and cost performance per unit of service. In this article we will put the spotlight on clinical laboratory. Every hospital has a lab, and the data shows that costs vary significantly when producing a single lab result. Labor and supplies are the basic components of cost, and in most cases, these two items make up 70% of the expense of testing. HFS did an analysis of over three hundred acute care hospital laboratories in California. We studied productivity and cost performance, and identified the operating configuration in which a lab (theoretically) makes or loses money for the hospital.