NEW YORK - Quest Diagnostics said on Wednesday that it has acquired certain assets of the clinical laboratory services business of Boston Clinical Laboratories, a Waltham, Massachusetts-based regional provider of lab services.
The purchase price of the transaction was not disclosed. However, Quest said that the BCL services will transition to the Quest Diagnostics laboratory in nearby Marlborough, Massachusetts.
"Given increasing reimbursement pressures on today's labs, now is the right time for BCL to transition the business," Boston Clinical Laboratories COO Hossein Bayat said in a statement.
The acquisition is the latest in a series of acquisitions or partnerships for Quest, driven largely by the effects of the Protecting Access to Medicare Act (PAMA). Though many industry observers have expected implementation last year of PAMA to drive a spate of acquisitions in the industry, the effect has been relatively muted. For example, in 2018, Quest made three acquisitions, down from 12 that it announced or completed the year before. And this year the company has tended toward forming partnerships with hospital labs rather than acquiring them outright, entering agreements to provide testing and lab management services to Georgia-based Houston Medical Center and Perry Hospital, Regional Medical Center of Orangeburg, South Carolina, and Catholic Health Services of Long Island.
As recently reported by 360Dx, the bigger clinical labs, such as Quest, have entered the next phase of acquisitions in the industry, ones that are more complex and are thus slowing down the pace of acquisitions in the lab industry.