Strategic Challenges Facing Hospital-Based Pathology & Lab Medicine Groups

When browsing the July issue of Laboratory Economics, I came across the following table: What are the biggest challenges pathology groups will face over the next 5 years?  I thought that such a list would be a good starting point for generating an expanded list of the major strategic challenges facing hospital-based pathology and lab medicine groups in the near-term. To launch this discussion, I now provide this table for your review.

It's clear to me that nearly all of the items in this table represent major challenges with the exception perhaps of pod labs that I believe are declining in strategic importance, as the table reflects, and will continue to decline because of legal and regulatory challenges. In addition, I will add three additional items to the list to reach an even ten: acquisition of capital funds, regulatory pressure, and the challenge of increased laboratory automation.

This leads me to offer the following list to readers of what I believe are the top ten strategic challenges facing hospital-based pathology and clinical labs:

• Declining reimbursement
• Competition from commercial labs
• Staffing shortages, particularly medical technologists
• Specialty physician groups insourcing surgical pathology services
• Demand for more sophisticated molecular diagnostic products
• Selection and deployment of new information technology
• State and federal clinical laboratory regulation
• Increasing pressure for enhanced laboratory automation
• Deploying point-of-care lab systems
• Evolution of the digital pathology department

I debated whether I should assume that digital imaging is included in the information technology category but decided to keep is as its own separate category because it poses a set of challenges far beyond technical solutions. I would be interested in any comments from readers of this blog about how to improve this list. It is my intention in future months to attempt to address many of these issues in greater detail.