Examples of Successful Business and Clinical Motivators Laboratory Corporation of America (LabCorp) Contact Person Tom Kaminski Demographics/Quantitative Information Type of organization - LabCorp - Large company that provides web-referring testing services and clinical research services - Diagnostic testing - they work with physicians and pharmaceutical companies Number of physicians involved - More than 220,000 customers, including physician groups or hospitals. - Interact with a couple hundred thousand physicians on a daily basis Number of patients involved - Every day they receive specimens from over 500,000 patients Timeframe - To be launched this August What is the innovation? - We re going to launch a website this summer that will enable patients to order lab tests directly from LabCorp without having to visit their physician. They can go online and browse hundreds of
tests, add the tests to the shopping cart and pay by credit card or PayPal. Regulations vary state-to-state, but LabCorp will have business rules to make sure that when a physician order is required, we will connect the customer to a physician to comply with laws. What issue or problem is your organization seeking to address with this project? - The innovation will extend access and convenience to consumers who want to take charge of their health. - It will create transparency in the fee schedule for the test pricing. As people are taking on higher deductibles, the introduction of a transparent fee schedule will help address cost efficiencies. What is the purpose of the Innovation? What approach did your organization use to address this problem? - We ve done a lot of work thinking about user-centered design. LabCorp is particularly interested in understanding the motivations for consumers regarding self-initiated tests, what consumers want to accomplish, and how are they going to use the testing information. - Through that process, we have identified four or five different personas of people with different motivations for what they would want from the user experience. This was reflected in a lot of the actual build-out work, such as consumer marketing by working closely with IT development groups. - External IT development groups that have consumer experience were consulted to help them build a user experience. - We worked closely with all aspects of our organization, including:
What stakeholders are involved/affected? What are their roles? How was stakeholder buyin/participation obtained? - Legal and Compliance teams to make sure all the details are compliant with all states and federal laws. - CMO and our team of physicians to ensure that the tests have a high degree of evidence to support use. - IT department to make sure that external groups can interface in an efficient way. - User research groups to look at other organizations similar to LabCorp that are using user-centered web designs. - To engage stakeholders, we used a combination of face-toface meetings and workshop sessions to bring people from different functional areas together. What objectives/goals are you trying to achieve? How are those objectives/goals defined? - New service will be launched this summer. LabCorp intends to track metrics to compare with the goals after the launch. From a core business perspective, we will be looking at revenue, volume, customer experience, and percentage of repeat orders. Considering tracking customer satisfaction rates (can send more details on specific metrics and measures to be used). How did you prepare your organization to adopt a new approach for solving this problem? - This has been an interesting experience for us here at LabCorp. COO Dave King is one of the primary champions for this idea and has done a remarkable job of communicating throughout the
How were different stakeholders prepared for adopting new processes and/or technology? organization at various levels why it is important to develop a closer relationship with consumers and has addressed fears around negative feedback from existing physician customers. - We had some concerns that our existing physician customers may not be happy that they will be providing direct access to tests for patients. LabCorp reiterated that our intent is to help people take charge of their health and work with physicians to facilitate enabling increased patient involvement. This is consistent with broader population health benefit. - Helping to change this mentality internally requires constructing a consistent communication message that is conveyed and supported by the top level of the organization. This creates stakeholder buy-in. Use What have been the benefits of using health IT for this problem? - The biggest benefit is one of convenience. We are living in an ondemand, Uber-like world that is very different from traditional healthcare services that were offered. Looking at the Millennial generation, there is a notion that people want convenience in terms of how they are able to access healthcare. - As they evolve the offering, over time it does relate to population health and is a mechanism to give people who might not otherwise be able to get tested the means to access tests. What are the short vs. longterm benefits that will accrue from the use of health IT? - Short-term: Business opportunity to increase volume and revenue - Long-term: More around what is the consumer perception of the LabCorp brand. A perception of convenience and caring about patients as people. -
- Also long-term is the possibility of linking this offering to the clinical research side of the organization. As they develop a more direct connection with consumers as customers, there is an opportunity to advance their clinical research mission. This can be done by contacting people to ask if they want to be involved in clinical trials based on what their test results are to helping advance science. This is another mechanism to really develop a relationship with people who want to actively manage their health. How do actual benefits compare with expected benefits? - This will be assessed a couple of months after launch. How have you assessed/measured the value of the tool? What indicators (e.g. cost, quality, outcomes, satisfaction, etc.) have you used? - This will be assessed after launch (indicators will be sent to me). What would you have done differently? What key factors made this successful?
Where did you meet resistance and how did you overcome it? Lessons Learned What unintended consequences emerged from the use of health IT, and how have you addressed those? How do we move this forward [scale] to impact the greater healthcare ecosystem? Summary Document for Resource Site 1. Executive summary 2. Description of problem 3. What was done to solve problem 4. Implementation 5. Barriers 6. Difficulties encountered 7. Impact 8. Policies adopted 9. Key lessons learned 10. Portability 11. Quantitative data