Next to medications, offering affordable lab testing is another way of increasing the value of patient memberships while also adding another notch to the belt of your clinic’s versatility. It means your patients will have access to affordable lab work carried out quickly and provided with minimal extra cost to them.
To start, contact labs such as Quest, Mercy or LabCorp and open up a new account with “client bill rates” for all labs. This ensures that the clinic and physician (instead of the patient) will be billed by the lab directly and that these savings can then be passed on to the patient.
The labs will provide you with all the supplies you need, like tubes, tourniquets, and needles, in order to gather samples and specimens such as blood or urine, at no cost. This saves both time and money by incentivizing physicians to draw samples at their clinics and send them to the labs, rather than sending patients to a lab itself.
Pricing for lab work is often the cost of the tests + 10% billed to the patient.
It’s a good idea to never agree to discounts offered by labs based on volume. The reason being that a clinic’s volume will change every single month. Under such an agreement, labs will have no problem changing their pricing if you’re not sending through enough monthly orders. By not agreeing to a certain volume each month, the labs’ pricing will stay consistent and you won’t have to worry about any sudden price fluctuations.
You can see the full list of labs pricing here:
It’s important to note that setting up an account with a lab can take a couple of months, so it’s advised to do it sooner rather than later.
That way you can start to offer these services as soon as possible after opening your clinic.
View Lab Pricing Sample