CAPHLD
Whitepaper

TEST COST COMPARISONS

• Fee schedules and sliding scale rates offered by some laboratories can be very misleading. When comparing cost between laboratories one must be aware that a hospital laboratory may use its CAP unit cost to show lower cost for microbiology tests than those offered by the public health laboratory. This can be false because the hospital may average its cost for test based upon high volume low-cost automated services such as chemistry and hematology. this lower CAP unit cost per minute will make their microbiology services appear to be economical. One must only compare cost of their microbiology to public health laboratory microbiology.
• Public health laboratories provide highly complex testing service meeting CLIA'88 criteria in several areas in Diagnostic Microbiology. Therefore, it is necessary when comparing prices to agree not just on the CPT code that is being compared, but what is actually done within that code. The public health laboratory procedure may be more complex and extensive than that of another laboratory. In such a case, cost really can't be considered equal if the breadth and depth of the service are not equal.