And it's good medicine. Setting up your own office laboratory offers some clear advantages. When you need quick clinical information, you can get test results back in minutes instead of hours or days. Patients get treated faster and more effectively, and when done well, physician office labs add to your practice coffers and income. While office labs do pose some disadvantages in the form of regulations, the rules are probably not as formidable as you think.
Federal regulations are neither particularly expensive nor difficult to follow.
And with the price of equipment declining, it's less expensive than ever to start up. Here are some tips on how even small practices can make office labs work. CLIA sets standards for quality control, personnel requirements, test management procedures, proficiency testing and inspections. But physicians who have labs say the regulations are not all that burdensome. If you're a small practice, one option is to hire a qualified medical technologist as a consultant to set up a CLIA compliance manual and related procedures, get the lab running and help train your own laboratory person.