Entrepreneurs and healthcare professionals can start medical laboratories. In fact, most labs start out as entrepreneurial ventures by healthcare professionals or business owners looking to develop new tech. However, these individuals must face and overcome certain challenges for their medical laboratory business to thrive and succeed. Three of the most common challenges facing laboratories today are listed below.
1. Staffing Issues
Most labs in the US are short-staffed. As top-performing members of the workforce approach retirement, new labs face the challenge of finding new, highly experienced staff that they can afford. As a result, most labs are forced to operate with staff shortages and mid- to low-level expertise at the onset. Staffing shortages cause other problems, such as overworked employees and inefficiencies. However, medical lab start-ups that use clinical/medical laboratory consulting and recruiting experts from the onset can avoid the staffing challenges of starting a medical laboratory business.
2. Poor Management Training
Medical laboratory personnel often transition into management roles without receiving formal managerial training. As a result, many medical laboratory businesses end up being run by individuals who have a medical background but aren’t necessarily sure of how to be good business managers. Unskilled managers face many issues in communication, delegation, and conflict resolution. These issues tend to overrun the good aspects of the core business in the long term, leading to failure.
3. Internal Conflict
Considering laboratories are high-stress environments with close-knit teams, they tend to be more prone to internal conflict between coworkers. For a start-up, internal conflict can bring down the business faster than usual if coworkers focus on tearing each other down. Given the importance of teamwork in the eventual success of a lab, it’s understandable that internal conflict tends to lower the morale of medical laboratories.
Conclusion
Staffing shortages, poor management training, and internal conflict are three of the most common challenges facing laboratories in the US at the moment. Luckily, these problems can be dealt with from the onset by seeking expert medical laboratory consulting services.
Perhaps even the bigger challenge of the managers is the micromanaging by the authorities higher than Managers in medical fields.
That’s a fair point! There’s a constant push and pull between good regulation and potentially stifling innovation.