With 13 hospitals and over 2,000 providers, Geisinger is an integrated delivery network (IDN) serving more than 1.5 million patients in central and northeast Pennsylvania. With a focus on delivering the highest quality patient care, we asked Dr. Ben Hohmuth, practicing hospitalist and CMIO, responsible for the clinical enterprise and information systems at Geisinger, to discuss the challenges and opportunities of managing high-cost lab tests for a growing health system.

Challenges
One challenge with high-cost labs is keeping tabs on the appropriate utilization of expensive testing. Oftentimes labs are requested without a complete understanding by the provider of the actual cost of the test. “We want to promote high-value laboratory testing, where appropriate, and understand key areas where we may be under- or over-utilizing testing procedures. We didn’t have clear guidelines when it came to relevancy of certain lab tests,” said Hohmuth. The high-cost lab alerts developed by Stanson Health, a Premier company, offered Geisinger the pricing transparency for lab orders at the point of order entry.