How Labs Can Achieve Success in the Long-Term Care Market

With a rapidly aging population, the growth of the American long-term care (LTC) sector will continue to accelerate. This increase in demand for senior care services—including skilled nursing facilities, assisted living, retirement communities, and home hospice care—presents diagnostic labs with immense opportunity, but also unique challenges.

This is a summary of the challenges that labs entering the LTC market will face and the solutions they'll need to succeed. The full version with in-depth explanations and case studies is available in the full post on our website.

Labs in Long-Term Care: The Key Challenges

1. EHR Integration: Long-term care providers are increasingly utilizing LTC-specific EHR systems. Labs must be able to seamlessly integrate with these systems to ensure secure and efficient data exchange. Many Legacy LIS platforms cannot feasibly integrate with the cloud-based infrastructure that modern EHRs demand, which could be an immediate deal breaker.

2. Staff Turnover and Training Burden: High turnover rates among staff at LTC facilities add another layer of complexity. Labs need user-friendly systems that can minimize disruption and streamline onboarding for new staff. Outdated LIS platforms with clunky interfaces contribute to staff burnout and reduce operational efficiency.

3. Differentiation from the Competition: Fast turnaround times alone aren't enough. Competitive labs can offer LTC operators additional services like pharmacogenomics testing, antimicrobial stewardship, and medication adherence. Labs must support LTC providers in meeting increasing quality standards and compliance requirements. However, this is only possible if a lab’s system can handle modern integrations and interoperability with these solutions.

4. Data Security and System Stability HIPAA compliance and data security are top priorities when handling sensitive patient information. For labs serving multiple LTC locations with fluctuating staff, maintaining secure access can be challenging. Legacy labs systems require cumbersome security measures, such as VPNs, dedicated workstations, and the IT personnel to maintain it all, which adds significant operational costs.

Modern Lab Infrastructure Enables Solutions for Long-Term Care

Dendi’s cloud-native LIS platform offers solutions to these challenges. With a focus on integration capabilities and ease of use, Dendi empowers labs to thrive in the competitive long-term care market.

Solutions and Results for Long-Term Care Labs

• Seamless Integrations to Enable Solutions: Quickly connect to LTC-specific EHR systems and a growing ecosystem of diagnostic solutions via Dendi integration services and open API.
• Improved Efficiency and User Satisfaction: A modern user-friendly interface reduces staff training time, improves overall efficiency, and increases user satisfaction and staff retention for labs and their clients.
• Automation for LTC Workflows: Streamlined workflows, including automated standing orders, mobile phlebotomy features, on-site label printing, and access from any device help labs focus on high-value tasks and provide personalized service.
• Security and Compliance: Built on AWS’s enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure, Dendi ensures robust data protection, HIPAA compliance, user account security (like 2FA and SSO), automated disaster recovery measures, and system stability without the overhead.

Innovative Labs Partner with Dendi

Diagnostic labs must be adaptable and provide personalized service in order to succeed in this market. Dendi's LIS platform enables labs to achieve more and gain a competitive edge in for serving skilled nursing facilities, senior living communities and home hospice care.

Serviam Diagnostics has partnered with Dendi to deliver a unique offering to senior living facilities. Serviam Diagnostics offers an ecosystem of services and technology to bring the value-based care model to over 1300 senior living communities across the US.

To read more about how Dendi works with Serviam Diagnostics and other labs succeeding in the LTC space, check out the full blog post.

The full blog post, case studies, and other in-depth insights are available at: https://dendisoftware.com/news-and-blog/