Presenters at the 13th Annual Lab Quality Confab 2019 discussed the negative impact of disparities between medical laboratory processes and SOPs
ATLANTA, Oct. 18, 2019—Several weeks ago, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) quietly released QSO-19-20-CLIA: Revisions to State Operations Manual (SOM), Chapter 6—Special Procedures for Laboratories. The release, which went to all State Survey Agency Directors, includes a “comprehensive revision to establish quality laboratory policies and procedures to ensure accurate and reliable test results to protect patients and improve the quality of healthcare,” CMS’ website states.
The revisions went into effect September 26, 2019.
For clinical laboratory administrators, managers, and
quality team members, reviewing the Special Procedures for Laboratories is
worth the effort as part of your 2020 lab quality program and continuous
improvement efforts. CMS made it easy to see what has changed by highlighting
the revisions in red.
One revision worth noting is 6006.4–Certificate of
Compliance, which has been revised to say, “A Certificate of Compliance is
issued to a laboratory after an inspection finds the laboratory to be in
compliance with all
applicable requirements.”
CMS Stepping Up Scrutiny, Particularly in Preanalytical Phase
Laboratories that deviate practices and processes from their
standard operating policies and procedures (SOPs) are going to get dinged,
Flynn explained during her session. Some examples recommended for review
included:
Validating specimen types, initially and as part
of a change in a major component;
Showing that temperature is properly controlled
during specimen transport; and
Mitigating risks as part of the shift to more
nurse-drawn specimens.
Additionally, Flynn noted that addressing deficiency citations, deficiency practice related survey data tags (D-Tags), and Form CMS-2567 (Statement of Deficiencies and Plan of Correction) are all daunting and complex. Many D-Tags have multiple regulatory requirements, according to CMS.
During her breakout session at The Dark Report’s 13th Annual Lab Quality Confab in Atlanta, Linda Flynn (above), Principal of LS Flynn and Associates, explained that the rigors of a CMS inspection far exceed those of other inspectors. “This is digging,” she stressed, adding that a CMS inspection comes with a big team of career inspectors. “It’s almost punitive … they know what they are looking for.” (Photo copyright: The Dark Report.)
Are Medical Laboratories at Risk for Factors They Cannot
Control?
Several attendees pointed out that in certain scenarios,
specimen jeopardy and patient risk are out of the medical laboratory’s control.
Nevertheless, Flynn says the laboratory is still responsible.
In addition to how a failure can adversely affect a patient,
the cost of failures can run into the millions of dollars which are attributed
to legal fees, consulting, staff overtime, and sanctions for the laboratory,
she said.
To reduce risk, Flynn recommends that medical laboratory
management address the complete lab continuum by getting out of the lab and
interfacing with people outside the lab who may adversely affect specimens.
Lessons Learned Through Health System’s Policy
Standardization Project
Intermountain generates approximately 10 million laboratory
tests per month, according to Zern. However, years ago, the health system’s
laboratories were not standardized at all. They were individually managed, they
had been writing unique SOPs, they were purchasing their own equipment, and
their vendor contracts were facility specific.
To standardize the labs, 11 discipline-specific practice
councils (work groups) were developed, each including representatives from
rural and core laboratory sites.
“What we found is that there is a lot of personal attachment
to SOPs,” Zern said. “As a team, we came up with better wording than we did as
individuals.” The end product was a single SOP, developed with the oversight of
medical directors and workable for everyone.
Clinical laboratory administrators, managers, and quality team members learned much at this year’s LQC. If you were unable to attend Lab Quality Confab this year, the digital audio recording series of 41 presentations is available for purchase. Go to https://www.labqualityconfab.com for more information.
At The Dark Report’s annual Lab Quality Confab for clinical laboratory administrators, managers, and quality team members, experts outline how disruption in healthcare requires labs to improve processes and cut costs
This is an opportunity for clinical laboratory directors,
pathologists, and other lab professionals, to comment on the proposed revisions
to CLIA before or during the upcoming CLIAC meeting on Nov. 6.
The agenda for the meeting is posted on the CDC’s website.
Public to be Heard on CLIA Regulations
“For the first time in its 26-year history, the council has
called for three workgroups to address how to revise CLIA,” Salerno said. The
workgroups will address these topics:
“It’s a dramatic step for the government to ask the
laboratory community how to revise the CLIA regulations,” Salerno commented.
Chartered in 1992, the advisory council meets twice a year, once in April and
once in November.
In the coming weeks, Dark Daily will publish more
information on how clinical laboratory professionals can comment on the
important issue of CLIA revisions.
Digital slides from Salerno’s keynote address are posted on LQC’s presentations website.
Clinical Laboratory Testing is Increasing in Value,
Keynote Speaker Says
As a service to clinical laboratories, Salerno outlined many
of the services the CDC’s Division of Laboratory Systems provides for free to
clinical labs, including information on such topics as:
During his remarks at the 13th Annual Lab Quality Confab in Atlanta, Salerno had good news for the clinical laboratory professionals in attendance. He said that lab testing was becoming a more valued commodity in healthcare because physicians and other providers were growing increasingly confident in lab test results. [Photo copyright: The Dark Report.]
Healthcare System Disruption Impacts Providers, Including
Clinical Laboratories
Other keynote speakers addressed how disruption in the US
healthcare systems affects provider organizations in significant ways. For
clinical laboratories, such disruption has resulted in reduced payment and
demands for quality improvement and shorter turnaround times.
For all these reasons, quality
management systems may be every clinical laboratory’s best strategy to
survive and thrive, the keynote speakers said.
The first keynoter was Robert L. Michel, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of The Dark Report. Michel’s remarks focused on how price cuts from Medicare, Medicaid, private payers, and the drive for value-based payment, are requiring labs to do more with less. For this reason, quality management systems are necessary for all labs seeking to improve results, eliminate errors, and cut costs, he said.
“The people closest to the work know how to fix these
problems,” he added. “That’s why labs know they must train their staff to
identify problems and then report them up the chain so they can be fixed,”
Michel commented. “Labs that are best at listening to their employees are
getting very good at identifying problems by measuring results and monitoring
and reporting on their own performance.”
Michel identified three principle factors that are
disrupting healthcare:
The shift from reactive care in which the health system cares for sick patients to proactive care in which the health system aims to keep patients healthy and out of the hospital and other costly sites of care.
The transition away from fee-for-service payment that encourages providers to do more for patients, whether more care is needed or not, to value-based payment that aims to reward providers for keeping patients healthy.
The consolidation among hospitals, health systems, physicians, and other providers. A trend that requires clinical laboratories to find new partners and new ways to improve lab services and reduce costs.
Informatics Performance Data Help Clinical Laboratories
Respond to Change
“The attributes of new and successful labs are that they will have faster workflow and shorter cycle times for clinical lab tests and anatomic pathology specimen results,” Michel explained. “That means that labs will attack non-value-added processes by implementing continuous improvement strategies [such as Lean and Six Sigma] and by the sophisticated use of informatics.”
Making use of performance data enables clinical laboratory
directors to make changes in response to disruptions that affect healthcare.
“If you have good informatics, then seven or eight of every 10 decisions you
make will be good decisions, and with the other two and three decisions, you’ll
have time to pull back and adjust,” Michel commented.
The second keynote speaker, Jeremy Schubert, MBA, MPH, Division Vice President of Abbott, reiterated what Michel said about how the health system is moving away from fee-for-service payment. Instead of focusing on caring for sick patients exclusively, he said, health insurers are paying all healthcare providers to keep patients healthy.
“Healthcare today is about the whole life course of the
individual,” Schubert explained. “Patients no longer want healthcare only when
they’re sick. Instead, they want to be healthy. And health creation is not just
about a person’s physical health. It’s about their mental health, their
emotional health, and their social wellbeing.
“In fact,” he continued, “you can learn more about a
person’s health from their Zip code than from their genetic code.”
That is essentially what TriCore Reference Laboratories (TriCore) has been doing in New Mexico, Schubert added. During his presentation, Michel mentioned TriCore as being one of four clinical laboratories participating in Project Santa Fe, a non-profit organization that promotes the movement from Clinical Lab 1.0 to Clinical Lab 2.0. (See “TriCore Forges Ahead to Help Payers Manage Population Health,” The Dark Report, May 20, 2019.)
“If you want to be a quality engine in healthcare you have
to be operating at Lab 2.0. Who is best qualified to interpret information?
It’s the lab,” Schubert said. Then he challenged labs to begin pursuing the
goal of achieving Lab 3.0, saying “Lab 3.0 is being able to interface with the
patient to address each patient’s problems.”
The 13th Annual Lab Quality Confab (LQC) in Atlanta continues through the 17th with post-event workshops in Six Sigma and mastering quality management systems. In attendance are 300 clinical laboratory administrators, managers, and quality team members who are learning a complete array of professional training methods.
To register to attend, click here or enter https://www.labqualityconfab.com/register into your browser, or call 707-829-9485, or e-mail lqcreg@amcnetwork.com.
As demand rises, Canadian clinical laboratories must learn to juggle test systems automation, funding challenges, and staffing shortages
Canada’s clinical laboratories are deeply affected by many of the trends impacting the Canadian healthcare system overall. Deployment of new technologies, such as test automation and artificial intelligence (AI) for example, are forcing Canadian labs to adapt during times of changing demographics and funding pressures.
Thus, the Canadian Diagnostic Executive Forum (CDEF), which takes place October 24-25 at the Westin Harbour Castle Hotel in Toronto, will provide an opportunity for clinical laboratory leaders to learn how to leverage technology and create positive change in their medical laboratory operations.
Change Management and Clinical Laboratory Leaders
The development of disruptive new technologies is becoming the norm and the laboratory’s role in healthcare delivery is growing. That’s why change management has become a focus of clinical laboratory leaders.
Sheila Woodcock, Convenor, WG 1 Quality and Competence in the Medical Laboratory at ISO/TC 212, and President and Principal Consultant at QSE Consulting Inc., Nova Scotia, Canada, says “allocation of resources” is a challenge for senior diagnostic executives juggling financial, technology, and staffing decisions.
In an exclusive interview with Dark Daily, Woodcock
said, “The number one lab challenge today is not having enough money; second is
not having enough people. Because if you don’t have enough money, even if there
are people out there, you can’t hire them. Money, people, and trying to keep up
with all the technological innovations bombarding us nowadays are the main
reasons to make changes.”
From deployment of digital pathology services and point-of-care (POC) testing to the introduction of automation and AI, innovation is happening at a rapid pace. It may or may not increase medical laboratory efficiency or support precision medicine, but it definitely alters laboratory infrastructure.
“Change is nearly constant in the clinical laboratory and
the healthcare network worlds, and there are many complexities that go with
that,” Woodcock said. “With the implementation of new technologies, and the
rapidly advancing world of automation in clinical laboratories that have never before
been automated, how do we ensure that when we automate new technology it
doesn’t negatively impact the quality of the testing process?”
Disruptive Changes are Redefining Clinical Laboratories
As Clinical Lab Products (CLP) points out, medical laboratories have become a reservoir of data that can “guide fact-based decisions to improve operational, financial, and clinical performance throughout their institutions.” As a result, clinical laboratories are increasingly shedding their “traditional and narrowly defined roles” in which “physicians order tests and labs report results.”
Emerging technologies also are ushering change outside of the medical laboratory. Drones soon may routinely transport patient specimens across healthcare networks. Dark Daily has reported on several new drone transport systems under development around the globe. One such system in the US involves UPS, the FAA, and WakeMed. Such high-tech specimen tracking and delivery systems could lead to fewer spoiled samples and possibly save lives, and clinical laboratories are at the heart of these innovations.
Kevin D. Orr (above), Senior Director, Hospital Business at In-Common Laboratories, told Dark Daily that laboratory leaders need to keep up with technology breakthroughs. However, knowing which tools and strategies are worth implementing is not so easy. Orr says diagnostic executives should take advantage of opportunities to “network to understand what is going on in everybody’s backyard, and to leverage some of the strategies, tools, and technologies innovators have used elsewhere.” (Photo copyright: LinkedIn.)
Kevin D. Orr, Senior Director, Hospital Business at In-Common Laboratories, believes technology may help laboratories overcome one major issue—a growing demand for testing services at a time when the laboratory workforce is shrinking, and provincial and territorial global funding is not keeping pace with diagnostic utilization rates. Orr points to digital pathology as an example of a technology that may enable labs to “do more with less” in terms of both funding and staffing.
“As people get older, there’s more demand for healthcare
services and because of that more clinical laboratory testing has to be done,”
Orr told Dark Daily. “The peak of the Baby Boomers is starting to get
sick now. We need to focus on innovations and technologies clinical
laboratories are employing to address the overarching issue of doing more with
less.”
How Clinical Laboratories Should Demonstrate Value
Woodcock, however, maintains that clinical laboratories also
need to do a better job of lobbying for funding, so they have the money needed
to implement new technologies.
“Traditionally, when labs are told they have cutbacks, they
do their utmost to work within what they have been assigned. But other
departments might be jumping up and down, getting more attention, and getting
more funding,” she said. “One of the things lab people have to learn—and are
getting better at as time goes on—is giving the lab a voice and making known
the contributions the lab makes to diagnosis and treatment of patients in a
facility.”
The Canadian Diagnostic Executive Forum on October 24-25 at
the Westin Harbour Castle Hotel in Toronto provides such an opportunity for
laboratory leaders to learn how to leverage technology to create positive
change in lab operations.
“We want to inspire people,” Orr told Dark Daily. “We
want people to leave this conference excited about what diagnostics is doing
and where it’s headed and what other people are doing. We want to show them the
bright light at the end of the tunnel, because sometimes when you’re dealing
with the negative aspects of no money or no staff or no this or that, it gets
pretty awful. We want to breathe some life and show them the rainbow and that the
light at the end of the tunnel could be just around the corner.”
The CDEF conference will be hosted by In-Common Laboratories, in conjunction with The Dark Report, Dark Daily’s sister publication. This two-day event will be packed with thought-provoking sessions on digital pathology, next-generation technology, precision medicine, blockchain, sample tracking, and artificial intelligence, as well as updates from across Canada on the latest innovations and technologies being implemented in medical laboratories.
The UE study sheds light on the types of bacteria in
wastewater that goes down hospital pipes to sewage treatment plants. The study
also revealed that not all infectious agents are killed after passing through
waste treatment plants. Some bacteria with antimicrobial (or antibiotic)
resistance survive to enter local food sources.
The scientists concluded that the amount of AMR genes found
in hospital wastewater was linked to patients’ length-of-stays and consumption
of antimicrobial resistant bacteria while in the hospital.
In a paper the University of Edinburgh published on medRxiv, the researchers wrote: “There was a higher abundance of antimicrobial-resistance genes in the hospital wastewater samples when compared to Seafield community sewage works … Sewage treatment does not completely eradicate antimicrobial-resistance genes and thus antimicrobial-resistance genes can enter the food chain through water and the use of [processed] sewage sludge in agriculture. As hospital wastewater contains inpatient bodily waste, we hypothesized that it could be used as a representation of inpatient community carriage of antimicrobial resistance and as such may be a useful surveillance tool.”
Additionally, they wrote, “Using metagenomics to identify
the full range of AMR genes in hospital wastewater could represent a useful
surveillance tool to monitor hospital AMR gene outflow and guide environmental
policy on AMR.”
Antimicrobial stewardship programs are becoming increasingly critical to preventing the spread of AMR bacteria. “By having those programs, [there are] documented cases of decreased antibiotic resistance within organisms causing these infections,” Paul Fey, PhD, of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, told MedPage Today. “This is another indicator of how all hospitals need to implement stewardship programs to have a good handle on decreasing antibiotic use.” [Photo copyright: University of Nebraska.]
Don’t Waste the Wastewater
Antibiotic resistance occurs when bacteria change in response to medications to prevent and treat bacterial infections, according to a World Health Organization (WHO) fact sheet. The CDC estimates that more than 23,000 people die annually from two million antibiotic-resistance infections.
Wastewater, the UE scientists suggest, should not go to
waste. It could be leveraged to improve hospitals’ detection of patients with antimicrobial
resistance, as well as to boost environment antimicrobial-resistance polices.
They used metagenomics (the study of genetic material
relative to environmental samples) to compare the antimicrobial-resistance
genes in hospital wastewater against wastewater from community sewage
points.
The UE researchers:
First collected samples over a 24-hour period from various areas in a tertiary hospital;
They then obtained community sewage samples from various locations around Seafield, Scotland;
Antimicrobial-resistance genes increased with longer length of patient stays, which “likely reflects transmission amongst hospital inpatients,” researchers noted.
Fey suggests that further research into using sequencing
technology to monitor patients is warranted.
“I think that monitoring each patient and sequencing their
bowel flora is more likely where we’ll be able to see if there’s a significant
carriage of antibiotic-resistant organisms,” Fey told MedPage Today. “In
five years or so, sequencing could become so cheap that we could monitor every
patient like that.”
Fey was not involved in the University of Edinburgh
research.
Given the rate at which AMR bacteria spreads, finding antibiotic-resistance
genes in hospital wastewater may not be all that surprising. Still, the University
of Edinburgh study could lead to cost-effective ways to test the genes of
bacteria, which then could enable researchers to explore different sources of
infection and determine how bacteria move through the environment.
And, perhaps most important, the study suggests clinical
laboratories have many opportunities to help eliminate infections and slow
antibiotic resistance. Microbiologists can help move their organizations forward
too, along with infection control colleagues.
Metabolic panels of 14 blood-based biomarkers that can predict when a patient is likely to die may be coming to a medical laboratory near you
Clinical pathologists soon may be able to predict when patients will die, thanks to a recent study that reveals new insights into how the human body works. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Germany and the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) in the Netherlands revealed a metabolic panel of biomarkers that can more accurately predict death within five to 10 years than standard measures.
The researchers’ original goal was to find blood-based
biomarkers that could show whether a person was vulnerable to death,
particularly if that vulnerability was related to modifiable lifestyle factors.
The researchers published their study, titled, “A Metabolic Profile of All-Cause Mortality Risk Identified in an Observational Study of 44,168 Individuals,” in the journal Nature Communications last August.
Metabolic Biomarkers More Accurate than Current Health
Measures
During their investigation, the researchers looked at 12
cohorts from previous studies and examined the results of 44,168 individuals
between the ages of 18 and 109. In the follow-up to the study, 5,512 of the
participants died.
In the introduction to their published study the researchers
wrote, “We first determine which metabolic biomarkers independently associate
with prospective mortality in all individuals. Subsequently, we test the
association of the biomarkers with mortality in different age strata.”
The researchers then used the 14 biomarkers they identified to
create a score that predicts mortality within five to 10 years.
The measures that most providers currently use to determine an elderly person’s overall health generally include blood pressure, heart rate, and functionality measures such as grip strength and gait. However, P. Eline Slagboom, PhD, LUMC Professor of Molecular Epidemiology and the study’s director, told The Scientist that those metrics are not always accurate methods for measuring health.
“For example, a somewhat higher weight, blood pressure, or
cholesterol level is not as bad for individuals over 80 years of age as
compared to younger individuals,” she said.
As it turned out, the traditional measures were
significantly less accurate than the score Slagboom and her team developed.
Traditional measures were accurate about 78% of the time, while the metabolic
panel was accurate about 83% of the time, reported The Scientist.
Additionally, the score based on metabolic biomarkers was accurate for people
of all ages, rather than only among the young.
“As researchers on aging, we are keen to determine the biological age. The calendar age just doesn’t say very much about the general state of health of elderly people: one 70-year old is healthy, while another may already be suffering from three diseases. We now have a set of biomarkers which may help to identify vulnerable elderly people,” said P. Eline Slagboom, PhD (above), LUMC Professor of Molecular Epidemiology and the study’s director, in a statement. (Photo copyright: Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing.)
Study Yields Strong but Surprising Results
Researchers have studied biomarkers as predictive tools for quite some time, with only narrow success. The positive results of the Max Planck Institute/LUMC study even surprised those who worked on it. “We were surprised that the association of our biomarker score with mortality was so strong, given that it is only based on 14 metabolic markers in the blood measured at a single point in the life of individuals,” the study’s lead author Joris Deelen, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing, said in The Scientist.
But though the results of the study are intriguing, some
experts remain skeptical that a new biomarker for death has been found.
In reactions published by the Science Media Centre, an independent organization in the UK that promotes “the reporting of evidence-based science,” Kevin McConway, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics at The Open University wrote, “This is a solid and interesting piece of research. But it doesn’t go beyond investigating the plausibility of setting up a system for predicting risk of death, based on this type of data. It doesn’t claim to do more than that, and makes clear that there’s some way to go, in terms of research and analysis, until a risk prediction tool that’s useable in clinical work with patients might emerge.”
And in the same article, Amanda Heslegrave, PhD, a post-doctoral research associate and researcher at the UK Dementia Research Institute at the University College London wrote, “Whilst this study shows that this type of profiling can be useful, [the researchers] do point out importantly that it would need further work to develop a score at the individual level that would be useful in real life situations. We’d need to see: validation to ensure repeatability in different labs, production of reference samples to test this on an ongoing basis, work to make the individual score possible, validation in other cohorts and validation of all components of the panel. So, it’s an exciting step, but it’s not ready yet.”
Past Mortality Biomarker Studies
Other investigations into the use of biomarkers as a predictive tool have focused more narrowly on specific causes of death. For example, in 2008, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published a study titled, “Use of Multiple Biomarkers to Improve the Prediction of Death from Cardiovascular Causes.” The study concluded that using biomarkers and risk factors together “substantially improves the risk stratification for death from cardiovascular causes.”
Another study, from 2017, examined stress biomarkers, hospital readmission, and death. Published in the Journal of Hospital Medicine titled, “Association of Stress Biomarkers with 30-Day Unplanned Readmission and Death,” the researchers found that “stress biomarkers improved the performance of prediction models and therefore could help better identify high-risk patients.”
Other studies have examined the predictive possibilities of
biomarkers in:
Even with all of the research into biomarkers, scientists are still a long way from having a clinical tool to predict death. However, according to Leo Cheng, PhD, Associate Biophysicist, Pathology and Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Associate Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School, the Max Planck study is on the right path.
The Scientist states that though Cheng believes the
study doesn’t “prove anything,” he also notes that “using a score that combines
the information from all 14 biomarkers is ‘the correct thing [to do]’ to
provide a holistic look at metabolic pathways that may represent a person’s
health.”
So, it might be awhile before clinical laboratories will be
processing metabolic panels that return test results predicting a patient’s
mortality within 10-15 years. Nevertheless, how medical labs would be involved
in such testing is certainly something to think about.
