How LabCorp and athenaOne Handle Accession Numbers—and Why It Matters

May 20

If your organization uses LabCorp and athenaOne, there's a quirky—but important—workflow limitation you should be aware of. It has to do with how accession numbers are generated and processed, and if you’re not careful, it could lead to labs being missed, rejected, or delayed in processing.

The Issue:

In athenaOne, all lab orders placed within a single encounter will share the same accession number. If those orders are transmitted to LabCorp separately, only the first scanned order is accepted—the rest are essentially ignored.

This becomes particularly problematic when you need multiple accession numbers within the same visit. For example:

OBGYN Practices: Pap smears must have a different accession number than blood tests.

PrEP Programs: HIV testing often need tp be submitted with a separate accession number.

Standing Orders: Orders not associated with a current encounter are frequently rejected.

Why This Matters:

While many practices may find this to be a minor workflow annoyance, for organizations that must account for every lab for compliance, tracking, or billing, this issue becomes a significant operational risk.

The Workaround:

To avoid rejected labs, create order groups outside of the encounter. This is the only way to ensure each set of labs receives its own accession number when using LabCorp with athenaOne. We confirmed this directly with a LabCorp representative, who indicated this is a known limitation with athena’s current configuration.

A Word of Caution:

In one case, we had to create a workaround using a procedure template inside the encounter to represent labs that were actually ordered via an external order group. While this was functional, it’s not ideal and not a best practice we’d recommend for every organization.

Will It Be Fixed?

Athena has acknowledged this issue and referenced it in a support article, noting that a fix is being planned for a future release. Until that happens, however, organizations must plan accordingly and implement manual workflows as needed.

Need Help?

If you’re unsure how this applies to your organization or need help building a clean workaround, Ignite is happy to help strategize a solution that fits your clinical and operational needs. Reach out to us at info@ignitehs.com or fill out a contact form and we’ll be in touch!

Amanda Van Cleave

Amanda Van Cleave comes to Ignite with 18 years of healthcare experience. She started out in the industry working for a family medicine provider while working on her bachelors degree in Neuroscience and her masters in Healthcare Administration. She then spent two years working at Tufts Medical Center in Boston before joining athenahealth where she worked for 13 years. Throughout that time she specialized in onboarding, training/curriculum development, project management, practice management, consulting, workflow optimization, and staff augmentation.