Implementing Test Utilization
Speaker:
Patti Smith, Michele Koester
Contact Hours:
1.0
Date:
November 29, 2023 - November 28, 2025
Description:
The healthcare industry is shifting from a volume to value-based payment model, ushering in new economic incentives to drive patient, provider, and payer behaviors. This shift requires a new set of workflows dedicated to aligning resources and improving patient outcomes. North Memorial Health Care, a Level 1 Trauma Care hospital located in Robbinsdale, MN, realized that adapting to the rapidly changing healthcare landscape meant implementing a test utilization program in its laboratory to achieve four main priorities: population health, patient quality experience, operational efficiency, and profitable growth. The program required the implementation of a healthcare CRM system to provide insight into data that previously would have been impossible to monitor. Patti Smith and Michele Koester, both in lab leadership at North Memorial Health, discuss how the lab successfully monitored obsolete and unproven test orders to directly impact physician ordering behaviors and patient outcomes.
Learning Objectives:
- Evaluate the use of diagnostic tests to deliver the right test to the right patient at the right time.
- Position the lab to become a strategic partner with physician clients.
- Encourage positive ordering behaviors to reduce unnecessary testing and underutilization of value tests.