Quest Diagnostics was honored as a 2020 American Society of Clinical Pathology (ASCP) Choosing Wisely Winner for Quest Lab Stewardship Powered by hc1®. Quest was recognized at a presentation during this year’s ASCP 2020 Annual Meeting. This service provides innovative technology that assists Health System/hospital leadership and lab administrators to optimize laboratory utilization, reduce clinical variation, and ensures the right test on the right patient at the right time.
The Choosing Wisely Champions program is an initiative of the ABIM Foundation that recognizes the efforts of dedicated pathologists and laboratory professionals for making informed decisions about lab testing. Choosing Wisely recommendations improve patient care and reduce healthcare costs, and the Choosing Wisely Champions encourage their colleagues to use the right test at the right time for the right cost.
Quest® Lab Stewardship™ powered by hc1® is an innovative service that employs machine learning to harmonize laboratory testing across a hospital’s laboratory and other IT systems in order to help optimize laboratory test utilization.
Quest Lab Stewardship is an outgrowth of the professional lab management services of Quest Diagnostics, which Quest provides to dozens of health systems and hospitals in the U.S. to help improve their laboratory quality and cost-efficiency. Laboratory testing is the single highest volume medical activity in the United States with somewhere in the range of 4-5 billion tests performed each year in the U.S. Too often, an inappropriate test is selected, redundant tests are ordered, or a needed test is omitted.
To combat waste in lab test ordering, health systems and hospitals have implemented "test utilization" programs to identify patterns in lab ordering trends. However, these programs often require time-consuming manual uploads of data or use platforms that cannot pull from disparate enterprise systems or provide real-time test ordering guidance. Quest, with hc1, created Quest Lab Stewardship to overcome these challenges. Through a secure Internet browser, the technology allows the user to quickly pull and analyze data from disparate labs and IT systems – in real time – and match ordering patterns against guidelines, such as those of Choosing Wisely, to identify over-ordering or other patterns that may adversely impact care or costs.
"Lab testing is essential to delivering cost-effective healthcare, but hospital test utilization programs often fail to maximize its value,” said Lee H. Hilborne, MD, MPH, DLM (ASCP), Senior Medical Director, Medical Affairs, Quest Diagnostics, and Chair of the American Society for Clinical Pathology's Effective Test Utilization Subcommittee (Choosing Wisely). "With Quest Lab Stewardship, health systems have an intuitive solution to identify the right test, for the right patient, at the right time – the same goal embodied in the Choosing Wisely Award.”
The Choosing Wisely Award is part of the series of awards honored to individuals and organizations through the ASCP at its annual meeting.
For more information about the Award click here.
For hospital and health system lab administrators interested inaccessing the Quest® Lab Stewardship™ powered by hc1®, click here.
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