Low prices to encourage consumers to order its WGS service is one way Veritas co-founder and genetics pioneer George Church hopes to sequence 150,000 genomes by 2021
By announcing an annotated whole-genome sequencing (WGS) service to consumers for just $599, Veritas Genetics is establishing a new price benchmark for medical laboratories and gene testing companies. Prior to this announcement in July, Veritas priced its standard myGenome service at $999.
“There is no more comprehensive genetic test than your whole genome,” Rodrigo Martinez, Veritas’ Chief Marketing and Design Officer, told CNBC. “So, this is a clear signal that the whole genome is basically going to replace all other genetic tests. And this [price drop] gets it closer and closer and closer.”
Pathologists and clinical laboratory managers will want to watch to see if Veritas’ low-priced, $599 whole-genome sequencing becomes a pricing standard for the genetic testing industry. Meanwhile, the new price includes not only the sequencing, but also an expert analysis of test results that includes information on more than 200 conditions, Veritas says.
“The focus in our industry is shifting from the cost of sequencing genomes to interpretation capabilities and that’s where our secret sauce is,” said Veritas CEO Mirza Cifric in a news release. “We’ve built and deployed a world class platform to deliver clinically-actionable insights at scale.” The company also says it “achieved this milestone primarily by deploying internally-developed machine learning and AI [artificial intelligence] tools as well as external tools—including Google’s DeepVariant—and by improving its in-house lab operations.”
The myGenome service offers 30x WGS, which Veritas touts in company documentation as the “gold standard” for sequencing, compared to the less-precise 0.4x WGS.
The myGenome service is available only in the United States.
Will Whole-Genome Sequencing Replace Other Genetic Tests?
Veritas was co-founded by George Church, PhD, a pioneer of personal genomics through his involvement with the Harvard Personal Genome Project at Harvard Medical School. In a press release announcing the launch of myGenome in 2016, Veritas described its system as “the world’s first whole genome for less than $1,000, including interpretation and genetic counseling.”
Church predicts that WGS will someday replace other genetic tests, such as the genotyping used by personal genomics and biotechnology company 23andMe.
“Companies like 23andMe that are based on genotyping technology basically opened the market over the last decade,” Martinez explained in an interview with WTF Health. “They’ve done an incredible job of getting awareness in the general population.”
However, he goes on to say, “In genotyping technology, you
are looking at very specific points of the genome, less than half of one
percent, a very small amount.”
Martinez says Veritas is sequencing all 6.4 billion letters
of the genome. And, with the new price point, “we’re closer to realizing that
seismic shift,” he said in the news release.
“This is the inflection point,” Martinez told CNBC.
“This is the point where the curve turns upward. You reach a critical mass when
you are able to provide a product that gives value at a specific price point.
This is the beginning of that. That’s why it’s seismic.”
Rodrigo Martinez (above), Veritas’ Chief Marketing and Design Officer, told CNBC, “The only way we’re going to be able to truly extract the value of the genome for a healthier society is going to be analyzing millions of genomes that have been sequenced. And the only way we can get there is by reducing the price so that more consumers can sequence their genome.” Photo copyright: Twitter.)
Payment Models Not Yet Established by Government, Private
Payers
However, tying WGS into personalized medicine that leads to actionable diagnoses may not be easy. Robin Bennett, PhD (hon.), a board certified senior genetic counselor and Professor of Medicine and Medical Genetics at UW School of Medicine, told CNBC, “[Healthcare] may be moving in that direction, but the payment for testing and for services, it hasn’t moved in the preventive direction. So, unless the healthcare system changes, these tests may not be as useful because … the healthcare system hasn’t caught up to say, ‘Yes, we support payment for this.’”
“Insurers are looking for things where, if you get the
information, there’s something you can do with it and that both the provider
and the patient are willing and able to use that information to do things that
improve their health,” Phillips told CNBC. “Insurers are very interested
in using genetic testing for prevention, but we need to . . . demonstrate that
the information will be used and that it’s a good trade-off between the
benefits and the costs.”
Sequencing for Free If You Share Your Data
Church may have an answer for that as well—get biopharmaceutical companies to foot the bill. Though Veritas’ new price for their myGenome service is significantly lower than before, it’s not free. That’s what Nebula Genomics, a start-up genetics company in Massachusetts co-founded by Church, offers people willing to share the data derived from their sequencing. To help biomedical researchers gather data for their studies, Nebula provides free or partially-paid-for whole-genome sequencing to qualified candidates.
“Nebula will enable individuals to get sequenced at much
lower cost through sequencing subsidies paid by the biopharma industry,” Church
told BioSpace.
“We need to bring the costs of personal genome sequencing close to zero to
achieve mass adoption.”
So, will lower-priced whole-genome sequencing catch on?
Perhaps. It’s certainly popular with everyday people who want to learn their
ancestry or predisposition to certain diseases. How it will ultimately affect
clinical laboratories and pathologists remains to be seen, but one thing is
certain—WGS is here to stay.
The 80 scientists and engineers that comprise the consortium believe synthetic biology can address key challenges in health and medicine, but technical hurdles remain
Synthetic biology now has a 20-year development roadmap. Many predict this fast-moving field of science will deliver valuable products that can be used in diagnostics—including clinical laboratory tests, therapeutics, and other healthcare products.
Eighty scientists from universities and companies around the world that comprise the Engineering Biology Research Consortium (EBRC) recently published the 20-year roadmap. They designed it to “provide researchers and other stakeholders (including government funders)” with what they hope will be “a go-to resource for engineering/synthetic biology research and related endeavors,” states the EBRC Roadmap website.
Medical laboratories and clinical pathologists may soon have new tools and therapies for targeting specific diseases. The EBRC defines synthetic biology as “the design and construction of new biological entities such as enzymes, genetic circuits, and cells or the redesign of existing biological systems. Synthetic biology builds on the advances in molecular, cell, and systems biology and seeks to transform biology in the same way that synthesis transformed chemistry and integrated circuit design transformed computing.”
Synthetic biology is an expanding field and there are predictions that it may produce research findings that can be adapted for use in clinical pathology diagnostics and treatment for chronic diseases, such as cancer.
Another goal of the roadmap is to encourage federal
government funding for synthetic biology.
“The question for government is: If all of these avenues are now open for biotechnology development, how does the US stay ahead in those developments as a country?” said Douglas Friedman, EBRC’s Executive Director, in a news release. “This field has the ability to be truly impactful for society and we need to identify engineering biology as a national priority, organize around that national priority, and take action based on it.”
Designing or Redesigning Life Forms for Specific
Applications
Synthetic biology is an interdisciplinary field that combines
elements of engineering, biology, chemistry, and computer science. It enables
the design and construction of new life forms—or redesign of existing ones—for
a multitude of applications in medicine and other fields.
Another recent example comes from the Wyss Institute at Harvard. Scientist there developed a direct-to-consumer molecular diagnostics platform called INSPECTR that, they say, uses programmable synthetic biosensors to detect infectious pathogens or host cells.
The Wyss Institute says on its website that the platform can
be packaged as a low-cost, direct-to-consumer test similar to a home pregnancy
test. “This novel approach combines the specificity, rapid development, and
broad applicability of a molecular diagnostic with the low-cost, stability, and
direct-to-consumer applicability of lateral flow immunoassays.”
In March, Harvard announced that it had licensed the technology to Sherlock Biosciences.
Howard Salis, PhD (above), Associate Professor of biological engineering and chemical engineering at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), co-chaired the EBRC Roadmapping Working Group that produced the roadmap. In a Penn State news story, Salis explained synthetic biology’s potential. “There are both traditional and startup companies leveraging synthetic biology technologies to develop novel biotech products,” he said. “Organisms that produce biorenewable materials; diagnostics to detect the Zika virus, Ebola and tuberculosis; and soil bacteria that fix nitrogen into ammonia for improved plant growth.” (Photo copyright: Twitter.)
Fundamental Challenges with Synthetic Biology
The proponents of synthetic biology hope to make it easier
to design and build these systems, in much the same way computer engineers
design integrated circuits and processors. The EBRC Roadmap may help scientist
worldwide achieve this goal.
However, in “What is Synthetic/Engineering Biology?” the EBRC also identifies the fundamental challenges facing the field. Namely, the complexity and unpredictability inherent in biology, and a limited understanding of how biological components interact.
The EBRC roadmap report, “Engineering Biology: A Research
Roadmap for the Next-Generation Bioeconomy,” covers five categories of applications:
Health and medicine are of primary interest to pathologists.
Synthetic Biology in Health and Medicine
The Health and Medicine section of the report identifies
four broad societal challenges that the EBRC believes can be addressed by
synthetic biology. For each, the report specifies engineering biology
objectives, including efforts to develop new diagnostic technologies. They
include:
Existing and emerging infectious diseases: Objectives include development of tools for treating infections, improving immunity, reducing dependence on antibiotics, and diagnosing antimicrobial-resistant infections. The authors also foresee tools for rapid characterization and response to “known and unknown pathogens in real time at population scales.”
Non-communicable diseases and disorders, including cancer, heart disease, and diabetes: Objectives include development of biosensors that will measure metabolites and other biomolecules in vivo. Also: tools for identifying patient-specific drugs; tools for delivering gene therapies; and genetic circuits that will foster tissue formation and repair.
Environmental health threats, such as toxins, pollution, and injury: Objectives include systems that will integrate wearable tech with living cells, improve interaction with prosthetics, prevent rejection of transplanted organs, and detect and repair of biochemical damage.
Healthcare access and personalized medicine: The authors believe that synthetic biology can enable personalized treatments and make new therapies more affordable.
Technical Themes
In addition to these applications, the report identifies
four “technical themes,” broad categories of technology that will spur the
advancement of synthetic biology:
Gene editing, synthesis, and assembly: This refers to tools for producing chromosomal DNA and engineering whole genomes.
Biomolecule, pathway, and circuit engineering: This “focuses on the importance, challenges, and goals of engineering individual biomolecules themselves to have expanded or new functions,” the roadmap states. This theme also covers efforts to combine biological components, both natural and non-natural, into larger, more-complex systems.
Host and consortia engineering: This “spans the development of cell-free systems, synthetic cells, single-cell organisms, multicellular tissues and whole organisms, and microbial consortia and biomes,” the roadmap states.
Data Integration, modeling, and automation: This refers to the ability to apply engineering principles of Design, Build, Test and Learn to synthetic biology.
The roadmap also describes the current state of each
technology and projects likely milestones at two, five, 10, and 20 years into
the future. The 2- and 5-year milestones are based on “current or recently
implemented funding programs, as well as existing infrastructure and facilities
resources,” the report says.
The longer-term milestones are more ambitious and may
require “significant technical advancements and/or increased funding and
resources and new and improved infrastructure.”
Synthetic biology is a significant technology that could
bring about major changes in clinical pathology diagnostics and treatments.
It’s well worth watching.
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.
Another push for price transparency steps up pressure on medical laboratories and anatomic pathology groups to develop compliance strategies
Clinical
laboratories and anatomic
pathology groups are under increasing pressure to develop strategies for
making their test prices more accessible to patients. Those pressures are
likely to grow due to newly proposed federal regulations that aim to allow
patients to compare prices for healthcare services on their smartphones.
This new proposed rule comes less than a year after a rule
involving hospital prices was implemented. As of January 1, 2019, the federal
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) required
US hospitals to post their prices online. Dark
Daily reported last year about the risks and opportunities posed by
that move.
“In our current health system, there is an asymmetry of information for patients. They have few ways if any to anticipate or plan for costs, lower or compare costs, and, importantly, measure their quality of care or coverage relative to the price they pay. Transparency in the price and cost of healthcare could help address some of those concerns by empowering patients with information they need to make informed decisions,” said Donald Rucker, MD (above), National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), in remarks delivered to the US Senate. (Photo copyright: ONC.)
Giving Patients Access to Their Health Information
In May, officials with those agencies discussed the
regulations in prepared remarks for a hearing of the HELP committee.
“A central purpose of the proposed [ONC] rule is to
facilitate patient access to their EHI on their smartphone, growing a nascent
patient- and provider-facing app economy,” he said, noting that this access is
impeded by a lack of interoperability between health information systems, as
well as restrictions on information exchange imposed by health IT developers.
The proposed rule will mandate use of common software
standards so that app developers can access health information systems from
different vendors. As a result, patients could choose their own apps to view
their data regardless of which electronic
health records (EHR) system their provider uses. The rule also includes
provisions for dealing with so-called “information blocking”
by vendors, Rucker noted.
If the proposed rule is implemented as currently written,
there would be a need for clinical laboratories and pathology groups to ensure
that their laboratory
information systems (LIS) meet the specifications of the new rule. This may
mean that, along with enabling two-way digital interfaces with physicians’
EHRs, labs also would need to be able to pass data to the apps and mobile
devices used by patients that are covered by the proposed new rule.
“ONC’s proposed rule primarily focuses on clinical data,” he
said. “However, advances in computer science and the maturity of data standards
are accelerating the convergence of medical data with billing and price data.
As such, the rule proposes to include such information as part of a patient’s
EHI that should be available for access, exchange, and use.”
Enabling cost comparisons will allow patients to make
more-informed decisions about their healthcare, Rucker added. But he
acknowledged that implementing this vision won’t be easy.
“Unfortunately, the complex and decentralized nature of how
payment information for healthcare services is currently created, structured,
and stored presents many challenges to achieving price transparency,” he said.
“This entire information chain is geared to retrospective payments rather than
prices.”
Rucker told the HELP committee that the [ONC] will be
seeking public input about how to capture price information and enable price
transparency. Once the rule is finalized and published, providers will have two
years to comply.
Medical Laboratories Need a Strategy for Providing Access
to Patient Records
The proposed CMS rule imposes requirements on payers to
provide electronic access to health claims and other information for their
enrollees.
In her prepared remarks
for the Senate HELP hearing, Kate Goodrich,
MD, Director of the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality (CCSQ) and
CMS Chief Medical Officer, said, “A core policy principle underlying our
proposals is that every American should be able, without special effort or
advanced technical skills, to see, obtain, and use all electronically available
information that is relevant to their health, care, and choices—of plans,
providers, and specific treatment options.”
That’s all well and good, however, as Fred Schulte, a senior
correspondent for Kaiser
Health News, wrote in his coverage of the two proposed rules, “Meeting
these goals could prove to be a tall order.”
He continued, “For well over a decade, federal officials
have struggled to set up a digital records network capable of widespread
sharing of medical data and patient records.” Not to mention the billions of
dollars already spent by the CMS and ONC incentivizing providers to implement
truly interoperable health
information exchange (HIE) systems nationwide.
Nevertheless, pressure for greater consumer data access and
price transparency will likely continue to build across the healthcare
industry, including on medical laboratories. Price transparency as a trend is
making steady forward progress, despite resistance by hospitals, physicians,
medical associations, and others.
All clinical laboratories should have a strategy to make lab
test prices readily available to patients. It is something that will become
common at some future point.
How medical laboratories can show value through process improvement methods and analytics will be among many key topics presented at the upcoming Lab Quality Confab conference
Quality management is the clinical laboratory’s best strategy for surviving and thriving in this era of shrinking lab budgets, PAMA price cuts, and value-based payment. In fact, the actions laboratories take in the next few months will set the course for their path to clinical success and financial sustainability in 2020 and beyond.
But how do medical laboratory managers and pathologists address these challenges while demonstrating their lab’s value? One way is through process improvement methods and another is through the use of analytics.
Clinical pathologists, hospital lab leaders, and independent lab executives have told Dark Daily that the trends demanding their focus include:
Ensuring needed resources and appropriate tests,
while the lab is scrutinized by insurance companies and internally by hospital
administration;
“Our impact on patient care, in many cases, is very
indirect. So, it is difficult to point to outcomes that occur. We know things
we do matter and change patient care, but objectively showing that is a real
struggle. And we are being asked to do more than we ever had before, and those
are the two big things that keep me up at night these days,” he added.
This is where process improvement methods and analytics are
helping clinical laboratories understand critical issues and find opportunities
for positive change.
“You need to have a strategy that you can adapt to a changing landscape in healthcare. You have to use analytics to guide your progress and measure your success,” Patricia Nortmann, System Director of Laboratory Services at St. Elizabeth Healthcare, Erlanger, Ky., told Dark Daily.
Clinical Laboratories Can Collaborate Instead of Compete
Prior to a joint venture with TriHealth in Cincinnati, St. Elizabeth lab leaders used data to inform their decision-making. Over about 12 years preceding the consolidation of labs they:
Implemented front-end automation outside the core area and in the microbiology lab.
“We are now considered a regional reference lab in the state
of Kentucky for two healthcare organizations—St. Elizabeth and TriHealth,”
Nortmann said.
Thanks to these changes, the lab more than doubled its
workload, growing from 2.1 million to 4.3 million outreach tests in the core
laboratory, she added.
Christopher Doern, PhD (left), Director of Microbiology and Associate Professor of Pathology at Virginia Commonwealth University Health System; Patricia Nortmann (center), System Director of Laboratory Services at St. Elizabeth Healthcare; and Joseph Cugini (right), Manager Client Solutions at Health Network Laboratories, will present practical solutions and case studies in quality improvement and analytics for clinical laboratory professionals at the 13th Annual Lab Quality Confab, October 15-16, 2019, at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, Ga. (Photo copyright: The Dark Report.)
Using Analytics to Test the Tests
Clinical laboratories also are using analytics and information technology (IT) to improve test utilization.
At VCH Health, Doern said an analytics solution interfaces
with their LIS, providing insights into test orders and informing decisions
about workflow. “I use this analytics system in different ways to answer
different questions, such as:
How are clinicians using our tests?
When do things come to the lab?
When should we be working on them?
“This is important for microbiology, which is a very delayed
discipline because of the incubation and growth required for the tests we do,”
he said.
Using analytics, the lab solved an issue with Clostridium
difficile (C diff) testing turnaround-time (TAT) after associating it with
specimen transportation.
Inappropriate or duplicate testing also
can be revealed through analytics. A physician may reconsider a test after discovering
another doctor recently ordered the same test. And the technology can guide
doctors in choosing tests in areas where the related diseases are obscure, such
as serology.
Avoiding Duplicate Records While
Improving Payment
Another example of process
improvement is Health Network Laboratories (HNL) in Allentown, Pa. A team there established an enterprise master patient index (EMPI) and implemented digital tools to find and eliminate
duplicate patient information and improve lab financial indicators.
“The system uses trusted sources of data to make sure data is clean and the lab has what it needs to send out a proper bill. That is necessary on the reimbursement side—from private insurance companies especially—to prevent denials,” Joseph Cugini, HNL’s Manager Client Solutions, told Dark Daily.
HNL reduced duplicate records in its database from 23% to
under one percent. “When you are talking about several million records, that is
quite a significant improvement,” he said.
Processes have improved not only on the billing side, but in
HNL’s patient service centers as well, he added. Staff there easily find
patients’ electronic test orders, and the flow of consumers through their
visits is enhanced.
Learn More at Lab Quality Confab Conference
Cugini, Doern, and Nortmann will speak on these topics and more during the 13th Annual Lab Quality Confab (LQC), October 15-16, 2019, at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, Ga. They will offer insights, practical knowledge, and case studies involving Lean, Six Sigma, and other process improvement methods during this important 2-day conference, a Dark Dailynews release notes.
Register for LQC, which is produced by Dark Daily’s sister publication The Dark Report, online at https://www.labqualityconfab.com/register, or by calling 512-264-7103.
