Healthcare providers are focusing their efforts toward achieving the “Triple Aim” of improving health across the population, creating a positive experience for those seeking health care and reducing the cost per capita of providing this care. While certainly no easy task, health care IT, such as laboratory information system, can provide the route to reaching these aims.

Addressing the ‘Triple Aim’

The move toward implementing this Triple Aim only make sense – overall it meets all the strategic goals of providing better health care and making it more accessible while still driving down costs for health care organizations with increasingly tight budgets.

The three components of the Triple Aim – improving health of populations, boosting quality of care and lowering health care costs – are not mutually exclusive. Improving one element does not necessarily bolster the others, and as such, companies need to employ the right solutions.

For instance, an organization might implement a policy to reduce costs by streamlining workflows and reducing redundancies in diagnostic tests or therapies. The right LIS can help address this goal by improving workflows and allowing doctors to make diagnoses faster, but only if the system is leveraged properly. Without a careful rollout and implementation, the organizations might find that the staff is not effectively utilizing the technology in the most cost-effective way. So while this hypothetical policy addresses one pillar of the Triple Aim, it has a detrimental impact on another one.

This complexity makes it crucial that organizations carefully weigh the potential ramifications each policy might create. Further, due to the amount of time it takes for cost-reduction or population health efforts to yield returns – which can take years – it can be difficult to immediately judge the effectiveness of a particular goal-driven policy.

Using the Right Laboratory Information System

In the face of the challenges the Triple Aim presents, health care organizations need to ensure they’re using the right tools to succeed.

A laboratory information system allows health care organizations to automate report distribution and interfacing for seamless data flows, which cuts down on administrative costs and limits opportunities for human error. Implementing a LIS creates cohesive workflows that fit all lab sizes has HL7 interfacing with HIS, CIS, EMR and more. By streamlining these workflows, labs can speed up reporting and diagnoses and decrease mistakes. Collectively, all of these features can reduce the cost of health care without sacrificing any other aspects of the Triple Aim.

Further, automating processes and providing real-time access to all historical laboratory sample data for physicians, staff members and patients boosts quality of care and ensures these individuals remain looped in with the lab work they undergo.

Unlike the lack of support provided by larger companies, Aspyra’s enterprise-class LIS incorporates client-requested upgrades into each new build. This relationship between the client and the back-end developers means Aspyra’s LIS will continue to be tailored specifically to what the end-users actually need to succeed, ensuring software is built with the end-user in mind.

A LIS lets health care organizations improve workflow processes, reduces turnaround time and lowers subsequent errors, allowing organizations to focus on providing high quality care while cutting costs to achieve the Triple Aim.