Specialty’s success is tied to the success of your medical center through our shared interest in serving the needs of community physicians. With over 30 years of organizational experience partnering with community medical centers, we are committed to providing excellence in clinical laboratory testing at the local level.

Specialty can provide innovative, flexible support for our clients to develop customized solutions to enhance outreach initiatives. The most commonly reported obstacles to a successful outreach program are lack of IT connectivity, limited managed care contracts and inadequate billing and collections. Specialty’s unique suite of outreach programs can help hospitals successfully overcome all these issues while expanding the hospital’s ability to be the primary choice for their community physicians’ entire clinical laboratory needs.

Specialty’s unique approach to supporting hospital pathology and laboratory outreach helps hospitals connect with their community by offering valuable clinical services to physicians and patients beyond the walls of the institution. We can help your hospital gain recognition for service excellence increasing the confidence of the community in your medical center’s ability to provide increasingly sophisticated diagnostic and therapeutic services.

• Decrease patient out-migration
• Bond physicians closer to the hospital
• Improve hospital reputation for clinical excellence
• Expand community service mission

Specialty’s commitment to outreach provides our hospital partners with additional benefits:

• Improved financial standing
• Expanded revenue
• Significant profit potential
• Reduced unit costs
  
  
• Enhanced services levels
• Faster turnaround time
• Decreased average length of stay
• Enhanced diagnostic testing menu
  
  
• Reinforce the preeminent position of the hospital as the leader in providing health services to the community
  • Increased visibility
  • More points of contact
  • Enlarged geographic influence

In summary, Specialty’s outreach program gives your hospital an opportunity to expand its testing services menu, create profit potential, and increase its sphere of influence while lowering unit costs and increasing throughput.

The incentives of your hospital and Specialty are aligned—our success depends on your success. Specialty offers a full spectrum of outreach solutions, from advisory to consultative to comprehensive hands-on-management. The choice is yours.

Contact your local Specialty sales representative or call 800-421-4449. The Specialty team will present all the options and assist in developing an action plan. Whether entering into outreach for the first time, expanding your hospital’s market opportunities, or just fine tuning a program already in place, Specialty is the best choice for business development assistance.

Joint marketing is important for market perception and growth of your hospital outreach program. Specialty’s unique on-line tools can help you quickly create effective marketing pieces that will leverage the experience and infrastructure of our national laboratories with the local expertise of your hospital.

Strategic Analysis

Proper strategic planning along with appropriate senior management support is essential to the success of your hospital laboratory outreach program. The Specialty outreach program development process starts with front end analysis followed by on-site training, and then implementation of a comprehensive business plan. The analysis phase first takes a high level look at the market demographics and economics using Specialty’s detailed proprietary databases to estimate total outreach laboratory market conditions along with the competitive environment. From this basic data, a proforma financial analysis clearly outlines your hospital’s opportunity. On-site assessments confirm the market analysis and evaluate your hospital’s readiness to capitalize on its market.

• Market demographics
• Proforma financial analysis with ROI
• Physician mix with utilization estimates
• Managed care payor mix
• Competitive landscape
• Test menu development

Action Plan and Execution

The gap analysis phase reconciles the difference between your hospital’s current ability to effectively compete in the market, with the best practices Specialty has learned in its many years of providing laboratory testing to the community. Working closely with hospital leadership, the action plan phase focuses primarily on pre- and post-analytic process steps needed to achieve the desired market penetration goals.

• Lab operations
• Billing and compliance
• IT capabilities
• Patient service centers with phlebotomy
• Client services systems
• Logistics & couriers
• Specimen processing
• Sales force development and training
• Co-branded Marketing Collateral

Specialty can help augment a hospital’s existing infrastructure or can bring in additional resources to help with programs such as sales and client services training, couriers, billing and compliance, and joint marketing. For those clients just starting in outreach, Specialty offers a complete, proven turnkey solution, providing comprehensive pre- and post-analytic solutions. We will bring in the necessary staff and resources for a complete and successful outreach program. Recognizing that execution of a business plan is the most important step, Specialty works with our outreach partners throughout all stages of implementation. We will monitor and adjust the program and resources as necessary to ensure success.

Joint Directory of Services (DOS):

Creating a joint-DOS with a combined menu of the routine and esoteric tests physicians rely on is important in providing comprehensive patient care and helps create the perception of a larger, more robust and user friendly lab. With nearly 3,000 tests spanning all the major medical disciplines, Specialty provides advanced testing for specialists and sub-specialists alike, complementing your hospital’s menu and helping create added value to your outreach program. Our unique, proprietary on-line joint marketing site allows you to rapidly and simply merge your test menu with Specialty’s menu and edit as often as you need to. On-line versions of a joint-DOS can be created within days and can then be converted into a Word document for easy printing.

• Client test information combined with Specialty’s in an easy to use format
• Alphabetical Test Name Index
• Numerical Test Code Index
• Unique test codes and names for Specialty tests
• Optional display fields in the joint-DOS (examples: Turnaround Time, Specimen Requirements, etc.)
• A choice of covers from our series of templates
• Electronic, printable format

Hospital Outreach & Network Services

We view our relationship with hospitals as a partnership for ensuring continuity of laboratory testing services at the local level. That is why we offer a comprehensive menu of outreach and network support services designed to help hospital laboratories in their role as community service providers. Many hospitals -- from an individual facility beginning an outreach program to large hospital alliances looking for laboratory network solutions -- may be looking for outreach program guidance and resources. The Laboratory Outreach and Network Support Services truly distinguish Specialty Laboratories as the industry leader.

Specialty Laboratories Custom Web Services allows hospitals to leverage the advantages of our combined Directory of Services (DOS) under a branded Web design. Whether the hospital already has a Web-site or would like to create one, Specialty can help in all aspects. The end product will provide customers with a dynamic, easy to use on-line joint-DOS with multifunctional search capabilities.

• Any changes to Specialty tests are automatically updated
• Custom built administrative tool for easy site editing
• ICD9 code database option (same design and features as the test data base)
• Access to Specialty’s on-line tool for use and interpretation of tests

Joint Educational Materials

Specialty offers educational materials and other resources for interpreting test results in a clinical context and to help educate physicians and the medical community on the appropriate use of specialized clinical tests. By providing these tools to Specialty’s outreach partners with prominent placement of the hospital logo, hospitals will have the ability to:

• Provide additional, comprehensive clinical information to your physicians
• Differentiate your services from other labs
• Distribute a professional marketing package
• Develop a direct mail campaign - around the latest test developments
• Create demand for hospital’s tests