An interesting post about Labcorp's train wreck of a web site.

http://www.clearnightsky.com/node/335

thanks to Mark Celsor.

Satisfied Customers?

This is a recent document sent to me by an anonymous source at LabCorp. Click on the thumbnail image on the left to see the readable full page view.

No one told the LabCorp employees that such a survey was taking place.

I would think that an important process in a customer-focused organization is to involve employees in the process of satisfying customers.

If LabCorp were serious about this, there would be meetings with employees, and training to help satisfy customers. But all we get are little gems like this piece of paper periodically stuck on the bulletin board with no comment.

This is supposed to be a report on a "drive" to become a customer focused company. If so, the employees, me included, have never heard of it until this note magically appeared. That's it, just the note.

And management seems amazed that we manage to do as good as we do "in spite" of the pressure. If management spent a little money to hire more people to take the pressure off, we might even do better, and retain more customers and , gasp!, increase profits. But LabCorp has always seemed to be penny wise and pound foolish.

Come on, management, get a clue. Listen to the employees you so admire and spend the money to retain customers and service them in a way that generates word-of-mouth advertising. Its the best way to earn profits in the long run.

The Lab Assistant

I submit for your consideration an ad found on Monster.com for a lab assistant in a Labcorp laboratory. Go to http://www.monster.com/ and search for "labcorp lab assistant" and you can find the same ad.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Lab Assistant

POSITION SUMMARY: Perform specified tasks in the assigned section accurately and on schedule. Know and follow all safety procedures and be able to respond appropriately to an emergency or drill. Assist technical staff, other employees, physicians, clients, and supervisor in a cooperative manner. Carry out the supervisor’s directives. Act in the best interest of patient care and LabCorp.

ESSENTIAL JOB DUTIES:

· Assumes responsibility and accountability for accurate work.

· Performs limited testing, as assigned, following completion of training check out.

· Answers telephones in a pleasant, courteous, and professional manner, and effectively relays messages to appropriate personnel.

· Maintains a safe and clean work environment at all times. Attends all safety training classes and conforms to company safety guidelines and requirements.

· Conforms to established and new procedures and policies instituted by the company.

· Remains flexible with regards to work schedule as staffing requirements dictate.

· Trains new staff in lab assistant duties for the department.

· Adheres to and carries out all assigned quality control policies and procedures.

· Completes clerical work such as recording QC documents, logging in specimens, using computerized database.

· Performs instrument maintenance as assigned.

· Assists with inventory and ordering. Receives supplies, unpacks, labels, stores in proper place.

· Recognizes problems. Seeks assistance of supervisor, tech or lead lab assistant for problem solving.

· Participates in special projects as assigned.

· Performs work in the most economical and efficient manner in terms of time and materials.

REQUIREMENTS: High school diploma or equivalent required, some college science helpful. Excellent communication skills necessary to deal effectively with co-workers, clients, and hospital staff as well as patients possessing varying degrees of comprehension. Ability to deal effectively with all levels of laboratory staff and to communicate clearly and concisely over the telephone. Able to perform basic math functions. Previous lab experience either in student or clinical environment preferred. A willingness to work in fast paced, high volume laboratory. Data entry skills may be necessary.

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You will notice that laundry list of "Essential" Job duties. It looks quite extensive and seems to cry out for some extraordinary person to step into this demanding job.

But look at the requirements. The Lab Assistant applicant needs to have graduated from High School, or have a GED, or equivalent. A few sentences that pretty much translate into , "Is able to speak and understandable English." "Basic" math functions-what is that? Previous experience is nice but not necessary. And, of course, a willingness to submit to life as a mindless production line drone.

So, who, you may well ask, is applying for these jobs with no future, and where, if you are lucky enough to be unionized, you start at about $13.00 per hour.

The answer is, a few highly competent individuals who are willing to work hard and do an excellent job. And a lot of people who just don't seem to get it. They make mistake after mistake and are a burden on everyone who works in the lab. And of course, they mess up patient results in very creative and sometimes unknown ways. The last one like that lingered on for almost 6 months before being let go. Six months!

Other, competent lab assistants soon see where their own best interests lie and move on to other, better, higher paying jobs in the area. A turnover rate like that costs the company money. It also creates a pressure cooker work environment that only makes the problem worse. And last, but it should be first, the clients (doctors) are not well served and the patients are at risk. The doctors ends up relying on questionable lab results to care for their patients.

The answer is anathema to corporate profits. If you want good workers, you have to pay for them and spend money training them.

I salute the few lab assistants who make the work of this lab rat a little easier.

Lab Week

Well, we have just finished National Lab Week! How exciting! That was sarcasm, folks. For more information on this national event go here. How did we celebrate this event recognizing medical laboratory professionals? Lets see . . . . one day we got free pizza - 3 slices only please. The next day, we got one doughnut, two if your were quick. Then we were treated to ice cream, one ice cream bar. And one day we got a piece of cake. And on the last day, we were promised sandwiches, but ended up with pizza again.

What a sterling week! By the end I felt truly honored as a professional Medical Technologist. That was sarcasm again.

Next year I think I will take a week of vacation instead. Sigh.

Payroll

Once again we have had a payroll meltdown in our lab. The time clocks just stopped working recently. Now we are on the honor system and report our hours in writing to our supervisors. What is so frusterating is that this has happened before and just keeps on happening. I wonder why, if the company that does payroll is not performing the way it should, a new company is not hired. And so, we will get paid based on some assumptions about our attendance, and it will all be fixed on our next paycheck. So I am told. I find that I have to scrutinize my paycheck to keep the company from errors in their favor - never in my favor, of course.

Remember, this is a Fortune 500 multinational company, and they can't get the payroll right all the time.

I am a lab rat. Don't mess around with my cheese!

The Mission Statement

A few years ago, in what seemed the actions of mysterious invisible elves, nicely framed Labcorp mission statements suddenly appeared above all the employee time clocks in our lab. The Mission Statement can be seen here.

This sounds all wonderful and high-falutin', but it is just plain bull puckey. The whole goal for Labcorp is to "create value for our shareholders and opportunities for our employees."

I can tell you that opportunities for employees just do not happen. It makes me wonder about the value for the shareholders part as well. And you can plainly see where patient care falls in their priorities.

Where I work, part time employees are not allowed unless they do not have any benefits. Two part time people filling in one full time job costs the company an extra person's benefits. And we are told to wait for our breaks in order to use the restrooms. This is something you hear about in third-world assembly line factories that exploit workers, not a modern large U.S. based corporation.

Employees under conditions such as these can hardly delight customers. And with patient care taking second place to creating "value for our shareholders", I see that ethical standards are bent and broken every day in the lab.

The accountability part just puts the onus on the employee and takes the pressure off the management and gives them someone to blame when things go wrong.

What I see is that some people hired are excellent, a lot of people, especially in the entry level jobs that are concerned with data entry and accessioning, turn out to be unsuitable for doing the job.

Conserving company resources leads to what I have described before in my post labeled "Running on Empty".

Employees are the corporation's largest and most burdensome expense. When profits are down and expenses must be cut, employees are the first to go. Like Dilbert says, "Its like printing money." But no thought seems to be given to the increased workload of those left behind. What the corporation never seems to get is that too much work for too few people invariably leads to customer dissatisfaction.

Compromising the Specimen

Compromising the Specimen

Most people think that when a lab messes up a specimen, they either lose the specimen or mix it up with another specimen. These are the mistakes that get the most press and cause the most lawsuits. But these mistakes are rare and zealously guarded against. Bad publicity costs money, after all.

One of the most common mistakes a lab makes that compromises a specimen is to fail to preserve it properly. Most specimens must be preserved until testing, most commonly by refrigeration. Some must be frozen or must use a chemical preservative. When that doesn’t happen, and the test is run anyway and results reported out, and no comment added regarding the failure to preserve it properly, then potentially false results are given to the doctor and nobody has any idea that they might be bad results. These results are taken as gospel and treatment and diagnoses are based on them.

By far the most common error in the medical lab is just waiting too long to process and test the specimen. The specimen must be delivered from the point of collection, most often a doctor’s office, to the lab. Then it must be received, and identified. Then it must be accessioned, entered into the lab’s computer system. If many specimens are received at once, some may wait quite a while to be accessioned. Then the specimens sit around until someone can take them to the department that will do the testing. They need labels printed and usually they need to be added to a work list. Then they sit around waiting in line for the lab technologist to get to them and do the test. All of this takes time, often too much time. And as above, no one tells the doctor or patient if a particular specimen has been delayed long enough to compromise the results. No one finds out.

Mostly this is all a result of the Lab not hiring enough people to do the work in a timely manner. This is a way to increase profits by not spending money on personnel. The Lab gets away with this because no one is aware that it is going on, except the employees, who are not going to rat them out, usually because they are afraid they would be fired.

What you don’t know can hurt you.

Procedural Drift

At our lab, procedural drift is more like a torrent than a drift. Some people even have to remind the Supervisor to look at the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to remind him of the proper procedure. Reasons for this are manifold.

Most of the SOPs are out of date, some by years, if not decades. And this is because the supervisors have all they can do to satisfy Corporate bureaucratic red tape and paperwork that they have no time to update procedures.

Technologists are few in number and overworked. We never seem to have a full staff. This means training new people is rushed and slipshod, and leaves the new people to figure things out for themselves a lot of the time. It also means that Technologists can't take the time to look up procedures when they are not sure, and so they sometimes make it up as they go along.

Busy supervisors mean they do not have the time to monitor the work of the technologists and enforce proper procedures. Mostly, monitoring consists of correcting mistakes when someone complains about them. Otherwise some mistakes just go unnoticed.

Procedures are not indexed, not in a central location and not easy to find.

All these reasons, and probably more, are attributable to the mega corporation who owns the lab having profit as their bottom line, not patient care or client service. This seems to keep coming around and biting them in their behinds.

Labcorp Loses Out to Rival Quest

Labcorp suffers a setback when it loses the Aetna contract to Quest.

Read the article here.

And the Hits Just Keep on Coming

Here are two more personal experiences from other people who have been irked by Labcorp.

Read the first story here.

Read the other story here.

Running on Empty

Since our Lab was taken over by a Large Laboratory Corporation a few years ago, we have revamped our ordering system. It seems that accumulating inventory costs money because of taxes and other reasons. So we have pretty much gone to the just-in-time ordering philosophy, and not having any back-up supplies for heavy unanticipated heavy volume or suppliers back ordering items. There are problems with this, though. When an item is back ordered by a company, then we are just out of that item. If we ordered it from another company, then it would cost more and Corporate management does not like that. We are constrained by upper management as to where we can order our supplies, and brands differ from week to week as price shifts in the marketplace.

The result is that every week, or really, every day, we are out of something. So we must do some sort of work-around for some tests almost every day. We have to "make do", "deal with it" or do whatever it takes. Sometimes, what it takes is delaying tests until we get supplies, and thus delaying patient results. And it means sometimes that we do not follow our usual standard procedures. And sometimes in means that we can’t do the test at all, so we have to send it out to another lab to perform, which, once again, delays patient results.

But we can get away with this because people using our lab do not see the inner workings. They see only the incoming specimens and test orders and the report on the other side. They do not see the confusion and disorder that actually goes on.

Labcorp contract with United Health Care - a good thing?

It looks like you have to break a few eggs in order to make money.

In one case, The Connecticut State Medical Society has written to the state attorney general about United's exclusive contract with LabCorp.

Here is the article.

In another case, Doctor's are protesting the terms of the contract.

Read the article.

Trial to decide - did Labcorp misdiagnose cancer?

Did Labcorp misdiagnose cancer? That is to be decided in a malpractice suit filed recently.

Read article here.

Fallible Results?

It would seem that DNA tests can be wrong. Here is one case where a judge decided against Labcorp.

Washington Post article

Are we compliant enough?

We have to be trained how to be compliant with the billing and reimbursement by Medicare laws once every year. I almost know the whole presentation by heart by now.

More about compliance.

It starts out with the fact that Labcorp paid out a huge settlement to the government back in the 1990's.

Labcorp settlement

This is to show how important it is for us, the employees, to follow the law. Next is all about the law and how to follow it. It is almost as if we are being set up as the fall guys for the next violation that happens.

There is one interesting section where we are told about how there is a compliance officer and we are to call that person with any suspicions that compliance is not being followed, but there is one fact that is quickly glossed over. If one calls the government and blows the whistle on the lab's violations, then you get a percentage of the settlement the government collects, which could be enough to retire on.

Here is one such case.

Are we enlisted to help the lab hide what they are doing with billing from the government regulators? The billing problems are investigated by the FBI, so if you want to "rat out" your lab, just call your local office of the FBI.

The interesting thing about this was when the trainer said that there are two things that the lab receives and two things that the lab sends out. He made it sound like the lab is some sort of a black box. The lab receives a doctor's orders and a specimen. That is what goes in one side of the black box. What comes out the other side is a lab report and a bill. An account receivable. Money. Profit.

What was unsaid is that the input side of the laboratory black box needs money to run. As long as the output exceeds the input in regards to money, all is well. What really doesn't matter is patient care, client service or precision or accuracy. All that is inside the black box and unseen by the managers. It doesn't matter to them. Their job is to minimize the input money and maximize the output money. All of which makes life for lab rats like me very stressful. One way to relieve that stress is to blow the lid off that black box and give people a look inside.

Labcorp drops the ball again.

And here is yet another poor performance from Labcorp. Be sure and click on the links within the message for more information.

Click here to read.

And another Blogger who had a bad experience at Labcorp.

Click to read.

Slave Labor

Well, it is not just me. Here is an interesting discussion about Labcorp and Dynacare. This matches my experience almost exactly. Especially the "work like a slave" part.


Click here to see the discussion.

And in other news, it seems that Labcorp needs to try harder, since it is number two.

Click here for the survey.

Introduction

Call me Lab Rat. I work for a large Laboratory Corporation in a large medical lab in a major city. I don't want to narrow it down more than that just yet. This Blog is for me to to blow off steam about my work. Since I have worked there for a number of years, I have built up a lot of steam to blow off.

If you want to know what really goes on in a medical lab, behind the nice friendly facade, then stay tuned. Sordid details will follow as I get myself organized.