Choosing the right laboratory affects turnaround times, regulatory standing, and your ability to grow. This checklist outlines 10 questions healthcare providers should ask before making a change, covering supply chain resilience, data integration, and testing capabilities.
Why Switching Labs Can Be Complex, and Why It Is Worth Considering
Changing your diagnostic lab partner is not a decision you make overnight. Your lab plays a crucial role in patient care, clinical operations, and research initiatives. Switching means introducing uncertainty into well-established processes, from workflows and reporting to data integration and logistics.
Yet many healthcare organizations reach a tipping point where staying with the status quo becomes the bigger risk. Slow turnaround times, limited capacity, and outdated systems are among the most common catalysts. If you are thinking about evaluating new lab partners or preparing for future growth, this checklist will help you ask the right questions.
1. What Is the Lab’s Turnaround Time (TAT), and Do They Guarantee It?
Why This Matters
Fast, reliable turnaround times directly affect patient care, trial timelines, and business operations. A study of 11 hospitals found that reducing TAT outliers cut emergency department length of stay from 4.1 hours to 3.2 hours — evidence that lab speed has measurable downstream effects on patient throughput and clinical decisions (Holland, Smith & Blick, American Journal of Clinical Pathology, 2005).
What to Ask
- What is your average TAT from sample receipt to result reporting?
- Do you offer guaranteed turnaround times for priority cases?
Labs that provide Service Level Agreements (SLAs) on TAT are more reliable partners. High-throughput labs that have implemented total laboratory automation consistently demonstrate lower TAT variance and greater predictability across test volumes.
2. How Well Can They Handle Volume Growth?
Why This Matters
Your lab needs to keep pace with your growth. Whether adding a new service line or expanding a trial, capacity limits can slow you down. Labs that invest in automation handle large volumes without sacrificing accuracy.
What to Ask
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What is your current daily testing capacity?
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How do you respond to sudden demand increases?
Total laboratory automation has been shown to increase the number of tests processed per worker by 1.4 to 3.7 times across clinical chemistry and immunoassay sections, with overall lab productivity improving by approximately 16% over a two-year period following implementation (Kim et al., Annals of Laboratory Medicine, 2022).
3. How Well Does Their Integration Process Work?
Why This Matters
If your lab cannot integrate with your Electronic Health Record (EHR), Laboratory Information System (LIS), or clinical trial platforms, data flow becomes a bottleneck. EHR-LIS integration introduces unanticipated workflow changes across ordering, collection, and reporting — challenges documented even at large, well-resourced academic medical centers (Petrides et al., International Journal of Medical Informatics, 2017).
What to Ask
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What integration options do you offer (HL7, FHIR, API)?
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Can you accommodate custom data formats and reporting?
A lab that has navigated complex institutional integrations before will move faster and hit fewer surprises than one building these capabilities for the first time.
4. What Regulatory Standards Do They Meet?
Why This Matters
Regulatory compliance is fundamental. Labs must adhere to CLIA, CAP, HIPAA, and relevant international standards to ensure accuracy, patient privacy, and legal operation (CMS). Compliance requirements grow more complex for decentralized and home-collection workflows, where chain-of-custody documentation and specimen integrity need to be maintained across more steps and more variables.
What to Ask
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Are you CLIA-certified and CAP-accredited?
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How do you manage compliance for home-collected samples or decentralized trials?
5. How Transparent Are Their Pricing and Service Models?
Why This Matters
Hidden fees and unclear pricing structures can create budget problems that compound over time. Labs with straightforward, itemized pricing are easier to plan around and easier to hold accountable.
What to Ask
- What services are included in your pricing?
- Do you offer tiered pricing or volume-based discounts?
- Are there fees for integration setup, account management, or rush processing?
Pricing transparency is increasingly treated as a baseline expectation in healthcare vendor relationships, not a differentiator (Health Industry Distributors Association, 2022).
6. Do They Offer Support for Home-Collected Samples?
Why This Matters
The rise of telehealth and decentralized clinical trials has made home sampling a critical capability. Labs need robust systems to manage kitting, logistics, and sample integrity from collection to result — including cold chain management and chain-of-custody documentation across distributed collection points (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Decentralized Clinical Trials and Digital Health Technologies, 2024).
What to Ask
- Do you process home-collected samples?
- How do you manage kitting, fulfillment, and chain-of-custody tracking?
The global home diagnostics market is projected to reach approximately $8.5 billion by 2030, reflecting sustained demand for decentralized testing infrastructure (Precedence Research, 2023).
7. What Is Their Approach to Customer Support and Account Management?
Why This Matters
A responsive lab partner reduces friction and helps you deliver consistent service. When issues arise — a delayed shipment, a system integration glitch, a spike in volume — the difference between a lab with a dedicated point of contact and one without becomes immediately apparent. Dedicated account managers are standard at labs that serve complex clients at scale.
What to Ask
- Do we have a dedicated account manager?
- What are your standard response times for issue resolution?
- How do you handle escalations?
Customer service and account responsiveness consistently rank among the top factors in healthcare vendor retention decisions.
8. Can They Support Your R&D and Custom Assay Development Needs?
Why This Matters
If you run clinical trials or offer specialized testing, you need a lab that can partner on custom assay development. The FDA’s ICH M10 Bioanalytical Method Validation guidance (2022) outlines rigorous development, validation, and documentation requirements for bioanalytical assays used in clinical studies — processes that take time and expertise. A lab that is not already set up for this work will become a bottleneck.
What to Ask
- Do you offer custom assay development and validation?
- Can you support home-collection validation for new tests?
- What is your typical validation timeline, and how is it documented?
9. What Are Their Logistics and Fulfillment Capabilities?
Why This Matters
Efficient logistics and a stable supply chain are critical for decentralized trials and home-sampling workflows. Labs must offer reliable courier services, real-time tracking, and strict chain-of-custody protocols.
Supply chain fragility in laboratory medicine became acutely visible during the COVID-19 pandemic, when shortages of reagents, collection kits, and consumables directly affected both COVID-19 and routine diagnostic testing (Knezevic et al., Clinical Chemistry, 2022). Labs with diversified vendor relationships and documented contingency plans are better positioned to maintain consistent service during global disruptions.
What to Ask
- What logistics partners do you use for specimen transport?
- Do you offer real-time sample tracking?
- How do you maintain chain-of-custody?
- How do you ensure consistent supply chain management for critical materials?
- What contingency plans do you have for shortages or supply disruptions?
Effective specimen management and logistics have become a baseline expectation for modern high-volume labs (Terry, Dark Daily White Paper, 2021).
10. What Is Their Reputation, and Can They Provide References?
Why This Matters
Accreditation by recognized bodies — CAP, CLIA, ISO — reflects a lab’s commitment to documented quality standards. But accreditation confirms baseline compliance, not real-world performance in programs like yours. References and case studies from comparable programs are how you verify the latter.
What to Ask
- Can you provide client references or case studies?
- Have you supported large-scale clinical programs or public health initiatives?
- What do your partners say about working with you?
Labs that support multi-center cellular therapy programs and complex decentralized trials demonstrate an ability to coordinate across sites, maintain quality, and deliver at scale (Lindgren et al., Cytotherapy, 2021).
Conclusion: Make the Switch with Confidence
Switching lab partners requires careful evaluation. Asking these questions helps you identify labs with the speed, capacity, integration depth, and regulatory standing your programs need, while also delivering responsive service and the ability to grow with you.
If you are exploring diagnostic solutions for your healthcare organization, Nexus Medical Labs offers services built for the complexity of modern healthcare programs.
Schedule a consultation to explore how we can support your diagnostic goals.
