LAB-CARES in Action: The Future of Value-Based Healthcare Runs Through Your Lab

Quick question: when's the last time someone outside the lab called you a "strategic asset"?

If the answer is "never" or "I can't remember," you're not alone. It's the exact gap our recent webinar, LAB-CARES in Action, was built to close. We brought together three laboratory leaders and LAB-CARES founding team members, Aaron Odegard (Baptist Health Jacksonville), Dr. Melody Nelson (University of Kansas Health System), and Stephanie Whitehead (University Health, South Texas), to talk about something the lab world doesn't always get invited to discuss: value-based care, and where laboratory medicine actually fits into it.

Spoiler, we fit right in the middle of it. We just haven't always had the language to say so.

What actually is LAB-CARES?

Think of the LAB-CARES framework like DNA: two strands connected by a ladder of rungs. That's the whole metaphor behind the framework, and it's a good one, because a lab's ability to create value really is built from a few connected parts working together rather than any single heroic effort.

The strategic pillars (the outer strands) are the big-picture priorities: patient safety, operational effectiveness, clinical expertise, and integrative practice. The backbone drivers (the rungs holding it together) spell out LAB-CARES itself:

• Leadership
• Advocacy
• Best practice
• Community
• Access
• Research
• Equity
• Sustainability

Put them together, and you've got a framework for showing, in concrete and measurable terms, how your lab moves the needle on patient outcomes, not just test volume.

Why this, why now?

Because the ground is shifting under all of us. Workforce shortages and burnout aren't going anywhere; reimbursement models increasingly reward outcomes over volume, and personalized medicine keeps raising the bar on what labs are expected to deliver. At the same time, regulatory bodies keep raising the floor on what "meeting the standard" even means.

Taken together, these challenges create growing pressure for laboratories to demonstrate their value in a new currency: outcomes. Here's the thing the speakers kept coming back to, labs don't just support that conversation, they're the reason it's possible at all. Roughly 16% of the objectives in Healthy People 2030, the nation's decade-long health roadmap, explicitly require lab-diagnosed data. Thirteen of the 21 major condition categories lean on routine lab testing for ongoing management. Value-based care simply doesn't work without a high-performing lab behind it.

From "call center" to strategic partner

One of the more useful mental models from the webinar was a four-level maturity ladder for where a lab sits today:

1. Operational Lab – focused on producing results and keeping the line moving
2. Quality Lab – accurate, compliant, but still largely transactional (most labs live here)
3. Clinical Partner – integrated into workflows, helping interpret results and shape pathways
4. Value Generator – directly influencing population health, risk stratification, and care management

The questions you ask at each level look pretty different. Levels 1 and 2 ask, "Did we run the test, and how fast?" Levels 3 and 4 ask, "Did our testing strategy actually improve diagnosis, reduce downstream cost, or expand access?" Same lab, very different seat at the table.

What this looks like in real life

The panel didn't just talk theory. They shared what's actually happening on their own bench.

Daily patient safety huddles. At Baptist Health Jacksonville, representatives from every corner of the hospital, EVS, infection prevention, surgical units, pharmacy, and even the C-suite, meet each morning, and the lab has a seat at that table. Weekly "accreditation rounds" send a lab rep out onto the floor (and bring nursing back into the lab) to build the kind of relationships that make it easy to flag a problem before it becomes a patient safety issue. The result: shorter length of stay and a much more collaborative culture around safety.

Age-friendly healthcare. Adults 65 and older make up roughly 40% of U.S. hospitalizations, yet standard adult reference ranges and criteria often weren't built with them in mind. One team's response: applying an age-friendly lens to testing and reporting, and tying it to a value-based metric around faster time-to-diagnosis for conditions like mild cognitive impairment.

Chronic disease monitoring. By mining EPIC data for patients with elevated A1c and patterns of "ordered but not collected" testing, one lab uncovered access barriers hiding in plain sight, then responded with mobile phlebotomy and strategically placed draw stations in underserved neighborhoods. The completion rate for high-risk patients getting their ordered labs jumped from 48% to 57% in a single quarter.

Notice the pattern? None of these are moonshot initiatives. They're existing lab strengths, huddles, data mining, and access expansion pointed at outcomes that matter to patients and documented in a way that leadership can actually see.

Your turn

You don't need a system-wide transformation plan to get started. The speakers suggested something much simpler: pick one value-based initiative, however small, and fill in this sentence.

"Our laboratory will improve ___ by implementing/expanding ___ to achieve ___ for ___."

That's it. That's your first LAB-CARES metric.

So, where does your lab currently sit on that four-level ladder? And what's one backbone driver, whether leadership, advocacy, access, or equity, you could lean into this quarter to start moving up that ladder?

If you want to keep learning how to build compliance and quality initiatives your team can actually measure (and get CE credit while you're at it), swing by our Compliance & CE Library. It's full of courses built for exactly this kind of work.