Early in his career, Chris Rabideau, MBA, MLS(ASCP)^CM, senior healthcare consultant for ARUP Healthcare Advisory Services, hit a pivot point that drew him to laboratory operations and management. Now he dedicates his time to keeping labs healthy and testing as local as possible. After graduating with a medical laboratory science (MLS) degree from the University of Maine, he worked as a medical laboratory scientist in the hematology, chemistry, and microbiology departments of Affiliated Laboratory Inc., an independent regional reference laboratory, until he was promoted to evening shift technical supervisor at 24 years old.

“At 10:00 at night, our unpacking bench would be mounded with a pile of specimens. As a supervisor, I wanted to understand the peaks and valleys of our testing. Why is 10:00 at night our largest influx of volume? That started my interest in how the lab operates as a business,” he recalled. “Seeing that many specimens led me to investigate where all the testing was coming from, and then I realized we were doing work for clients over three hours north and six hours south. How did all of this connect and come together? How did it impact workflow and staffing levels?”

At that time, Affiliated Laboratory had robust outreach operations and served as the sole reference lab for Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center. This breadth of work gave the laboratorians wide experience with different patient populations and clinical specialties.

“I was really interested in the independent nature of our laboratory—how we operated as a business and how we made money. So I went to our COO at the time and asked her, ‘If I wanted to run a lab like this, what would you recommend?’” As a result of this conversation, he decided to return to school and attain his MBA with a focus in healthcare administration from Husson University.

In 2015, Rabideau became Affiliated Laboratory’s business operations manager. Additionally, he was given responsibility for the lab’s outreach operations, which spanned the entire state of Maine and part of Vermont and encompassed hundreds of physician’s offices, alternative care clinics, and hospitals. 

“I loved the autonomy of our laboratory. When I first started, it was my intent always to run that business. However, the company took some twists and turns along the way,” he said. One twist was the laboratory’s evolving integration into Northern Light Health, a 10-hospital system in Maine. As business operations manager for the newly rebranded Northern Light Laboratory, Rabideau helped grow the lab’s outreach business and served in additional roles as the laboratory’s safety officer, preanalytics manager, and education manager.

The second twist in Rabideau’s career came when Northern Light Laboratory was sold to a large, commercial laboratory in the wake of the financial turmoil resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. The laboratory was no longer the scrappy, independent enterprise that Rabideau had devoted his career to, and he made the decision to join ARUP Healthcare Advisory Services as a healthcare consultant in 2022.

Rabideau’s many years of experience at an independent regional reference laboratory and later at a statewide health system have been invaluable in his consulting work. “Connecting with outreach clients, being part of service-line decisions, equipment-level decisions—I understand what those decisions can mean for the bottom line,” he said.

As a consultant, Rabideau brings unique expertise in outreach, business, and technical operations.

“I enjoy the opportunity to see other labs and how they operate. A vast majority of these laboratories are dealing with similar challenges. Oftentimes, I’ve encountered these issues already,” Rabideau said. “Lab operations is what I lived and breathed for so many years, and I value being able to help a client, and I believe they value our team coming in and providing support to them.”

Rabideau had become familiar with ARUP while working at Affiliated Laboratory, which had been a longtime ARUP client, and he values ARUP’s approach to supporting its clients.

“I love ARUP’s mission to keep testing close to the patient. We don't compete with our clients. We want our clients to grow and thrive locally within their systems. And I wholeheartedly advocate for that,” he said. “Helping our clients keep their labs healthy, keep their testing local, support their staffing at a local level—that's what drives me.”