A community hospital laboratory computer system: an eight-year longitudinal study of economic impact.

An analysis of the intralaboratory economic effects of installation of a dedicated laboratory computer system in a 450-bed acute care general hospital laboratory is presented using data accumulated during an eight-year period. Data collection and analytic conventions used included: (1) an inflation factor derived from the CPI to adjust costs; (2) semilogarithmic plotting; (3) patient procedure counts tallied as the raw count for patient specimens according to the CAP Workload Recording Method; and (4) total workload (including patient standard and control items) recorded according to the CAP WRM. The authors conclude that computerization has produced: (1) a decrease in inflation adjusted labor costs per unit of work; (2) a decrease in inflation adjusted direct cost per unit of work; (3) A decline in the ratio of clerical to technical labor force; and (4) An increase in overall productivity of approximately 7%.