PACLAB GM Stewart Adelman says the OA toolbox fosters a lab-friendly system.

PACLAB Network Laboratories comprises an integrated network of local labs that provide service to physicians and patients throughout western Washington State. The venture pools resources of five established regional health care providers and furnishes the sole statewide lab system. It is a partnership among Providence Health & Services; Franciscan Health System, West; Overlake Hospital Medical Center; Bourget Health Services Inc, dba Pathology Associates Medical Laboratories (PAML); Evergreen Healthcare; and Stevens Healthcare.

Its market share has risen from 10% to some 30% since 1995.

The entity was spawned more than a decade ago as a defensive move to retain jobs and dollars in the state of Washington. The original members are health care providers in the state whose collective expertise spans more than a century.

Stewart Adelman joined PACLAB as general manager in September 1997, 9 months after the company was launched. He had served as the lab director at Children's Hospital in Seattle for 7 years, and his hands-on frame of reference stems from his med tech background.

All of the member-owners provide services to PACLAB. Every effort is made to keep testing local to the region in which it is collected. Esoteric testing is flown to PAML nightly by private charter.

PAML serves as the managing partner, providing the information services that let all orders and results be collated and reported. The results and orders can be manually or electronically delivered in several formats that dovetail with the needs and capabilities of providers.

"Since PAML is the managing partner of PACLAB, we get first crack at the technology that they have developed," Adelman says. "Each brings a different set of advantages, efficiencies, and tools to better serve and understand our clients and our own performance.

"For example, using the CRM product we can track every client interaction throughout all the lab's departments. This allows us to analyze individual clients or more globally over our entire database, issues, and opportunities for improvement. We can measure our performance in the eyes of our clients using facts and data instead of intuition," he says. "Over time, other hospitals' organizations have seen the value that having a robust outreach lab program can contribute to provider relations as well as bottom-line results."

Reign in the Domain

The company relies on a trio of products from PAML's new and independent operating division, Outreach Advantage: OAMobile, OACRM, and OAConnect.

OAMobile features an integrated route planning, scheduling, dispatching, and specimen-tracking system. OACRM furnishes an end-to-end workflow and business analytics tool that consolidates, transmits, and records marketing, sales, and client service actions and patterns. OAConnect is an integration platform that links lab information systems to EMR systems and Web products.

"The difference between Outreach Advantage and other vendors who are trying to solve industry needs—the core of it—is deep domain expertise," says Mark Johnston, OA's CEO. "What we're trying to do is leverage that, our daily operational support and experience, with a complete empathy for labs that are challenged by the issues. We incubated our products to support a variety of joint ventures that are anchored by community-based hospital laboratories."

Johnston says Outreach Advantage grew out of operational necessity. PAML is owned by Providence Health and Services, and as managing partner of several joint ventures, they are focused on providing outreach methods and tools that bolster smaller labs in communities they serve. "The opportunity to extend these tools is supported by both PAML and our common parent company, Providence Health and Services, so the creation of Outreach Advantage made good sense to everyone involved, he says.

OA has also signed a distribution agreement with ARUP Laboratories, a reference lab. "They want to support local testing in partnership with their customer base; they firmly believe in community-based medicine, and by bringing these tools to their customers, we are naturally aligned to support one another," he says.

OA is working on its next product OABI—Business Intelligence. "The concept is to bring different data in the production systems to a centralized data warehouse and then layer the business intelligence tools on top of it," Johnston says. "It will allow us to provide a comprehensive analytical analysis of what's happening with the business, and customer patterns and behaviors." He says it is important for labs to target their services to the subset of providers who need them.

"We designed an information ecosystem that wraps around and supports the pre- and post-analytic aspect of what happens in the lab," he says. "All of the OA product suite, logistics, connectivity, sales, and service through CRM are all designed to work in harmony to support laboratory outreach. That is the ‘Advantage' that our products deliver to the industry."

Adelman says he considered other stand-alone products, but PAML's toolbox provides a true lab-friendly system. "PAML has developed systems that work for the lab industry," he says. "Other products just don't work, or only do a small part of the job you're trying to accomplish."

Connecting the Dots

PACLAB has never looked back. "They have created systems that work in very complex business environments such as ours," he says. "The decision was really not tough to make when you understand the features and flexibility of their systems."

As with many transitions, the war stories are amusing in retrospect.

"Since we were part of the beta testing, I must admit that everything didn't work the first time. Our information technology systems link many, many systems and products together, so at times it is difficult to predict how connecting one system might affect another," Adelman says, quickly adding, "PAML's developers stuck to getting it right, so now implementations go smoothly and on schedule."

The biggest challenge for PACLAB now is maintaining reimbursement rates while the national labs concede to dramatically lower reimbursement scenarios. Adelman says costs continue to trend upward for labor, transportation, and increased regulatory requirements.

On the distant horizon, Adelman sees promise.

"We continue to see a bright future in our marketplace with the potential of new partners and IT solutions that work to help us manage our business more efficiently while improving the quality of our services," he says.

JUDY O'ROURKE IS ASSOCIATE EDITOR OF CLP.