Case Study: Alverno Laboratories achieves faster turnaround times and lower costs with Beckman Coulter

Driving Excellence & Impacting Patient Care Through Continuous Process Improvement

Alverno Laboratories, a community-based laboratory network with 26 hospital sites, faced challenges with inconsistent communication, a lack of standardized procedures, and rapid growth following a consolidation. This created inefficiencies that threatened their ability to manage costs and deliver fast, consistent patient results. To address this, they partnered with vendor Beckman Coulter to implement process improvement methodologies and tools.

Beckman Coulter worked with Alverno to implement the Danaher Business System (DBS), leading to the creation of the Alverno Business System (ABS). This solution focused on daily management huddles, a structured Problem Solving Process (PSP), and change management training. The results were highly impactful: Alverno achieved a 20% savings in operating costs, saved over 20 miles of walking per week, and dramatically improved test turnaround times, with one metric showing an improvement from 40% to under 1% of tests being unordered. Beckman Coulter's partnership enabled Alverno to significantly boost both efficiency and patient care quality.

Alverno Laboratories

Sam Terese

President and Chief Executive Officer