Chi also has a question about how we charge for tests interpretation. “Do you charge per test or per hour?”
Chris: We charge a fee which we call an administrative fee for lab kits, and that covers the cost of the staff time to order the kit, get it shipped out to the patient, answer any questions related to it, which is a considerable amount of time, so don’t underestimate that. Also, the clinician’s time to interpret the test, and it’s a good idea for you as a clinician to be charging for those things. If you don’t charge for your time for those kinds of things and you don’t either charge for it directly with a fee like this or you don’t wrap it into your service fee for consultations, you’re going to have a hard time making it because these … It may seem like, “Oh, five minutes or 10 minutes to look at a lab result is not a lot of time” and it may not be, but when you have a thousand active patients or even 500, it adds up, and you’ve invested an enormous amount of money, time, and energy in learning, including in this course, and to learning how to interpret these tests, so you should be compensated for that.
In some states in the US, people just end up marking up the cost of the lab by maybe 25 percent. I know some clinics mark up labs by as much as 100 percent. If the lab costs $200, they charge $400. In the state of California and possibly others, it’s illegal to markup lab tests, so we, on the invoice, we have a separate fee that we call an administrative fee and so we charge for the lab kit on one line and then on the next line it says administrative fee. What you charge for that, I think, depends on a lot of factors—the population that you’re working with, where you are, or maybe even the kit itself. But historically, we’ve charged $50 to $75 for that administrative fee.