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Uber Model Applied to Phlebotomy

As health care adopts value based purchasing, clinical laboratories must improve their patient satisfaction scores by servicing the entire continuum of care and improving patient accessibility and convenience. A traditional model to achieve these goals is to staff more patient service centers throughout the community and expand hours 7 days per week. The major obstacles to this approach include increased overhead expense for service centers, imited number of qualified phlebotomists and phlebotomist turnover.

An alternative model, called Iggbo, was launched in January 2015 and is now available in 18 cities including Richmond, Los Angeles, Detroit, Seattle and New York City. Iggbo adopted an Uber-like model to connect a workforce of more than 3000 independent phlebotomists with patients who have physician orders for clinical laboratory tests. Physicians use Iggbo’s app to schedule appointments for phlebotomy. Independent phlebotomists in the region can accept the appointment and choose to draw a patient’s blood in the physician’s office or at their home. Phlebotomists are ranked by quality and physicians can designate favorites. Iggbo’s app reminds patients to attend their appointments. Clinical laboratories pay Iggbo for the service and cost of specimen delivery. Iggbo pays the contracted phlebotomists.

More details can be found at the company’s web site, http://www.iggbonow.com/.

For most patients, phlebotomy is the only interaction that a patient has with a clinical laboratory. If mobile phlebotomy is accomplished in a professional and expedient manner, patient satisfaction scores should rise dramatically.

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