Review the Cost Per Reportable Test
Who / when: Dr. Bello, the lab admin, reviews the economics of the bench whenever he wants to understand which tests cost what they should and which are quietly bleeding margin. Cost Per Reportable Test (CPRT) compares the cost a test was designed to incur against what the lab actually consumed. A reportable test is a result that was released and verified — that is the denominator the cost is spread over.
The Cost Per Test screen is for monitoring, not editing: it shows costs but has no recipe-builder form. The cost recipes it reads are authored separately as a lab-admin setup step.
We’ll follow Dr. Bello reading the analytics, then the recipes behind them.
- Lab Admin — open Labs → Cost Per Test. It has two tabs: “Analytics” and “Recipes”.
- Lab Admin — read the “Analytics” tab. The readouts roll up, for the window, the total Expected cost, the total Actual cost, the Variance between them, and the High Variance count. Each test row shows its Expected cost, its Actual cost, and the variance percentage, with a “High Variance” pill flagging any test where the gap is 20% or more.
- Lab Admin — open the “Recipes” tab to see the costed breakdown behind each configured test: Reagents, QC, Wastage, Overhead and Total. This is the expected side of the comparison, ingredient by ingredient.
- Lab Admin — start with the High Variance tests. A test consistently costing far more than its recipe says usually points to wastage, a miscounted reagent, or a recipe that has drifted out of date — and it is exactly where a small fix recovers real money.
What happens next
Section titled “What happens next”CPRT turns guesswork into a number you can act on — the expected cost you designed, the actual cost you incurred, and the gap between them, on live data. With it you can price confidently, spot a reagent being wasted, and tell a profitable test from a loss-making one. A persistent high variance is also a quality signal worth documenting as a corrective action.