CDC AND CLMA COLLABORATE IN PILOT STUDY

CLMA has joined forces with The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the second phase of a pilot study to help define and identify best practices in laboratory medicine.

The overall goal of the project is to enhance the practice of laboratory medicine by identifying ways to improve laboratory testing and services.

The result, both organizations agree, will be the improvement in health care quality and patient safety in laboratories across America.

"Laboratory professionals and other stakeholders have expended considerable effort to provide safe and effective laboratory medicine services, but clinical laboratories share many of the same vulnerabilities that affect the overall health care system," notes Joe Boone, PhD, Associate Director for Science in CDC's Division of Laboratory Systems. "We believe that this project will help identify areas needing further improvement," he said.

As part of the agreement, CLMA has given the CDC’s Division of Laboratory Systems access to its database of Good Practices information and to its membership to develop an evidence-based process for identifying and evaluating best practices. “The Good Practices submissions, as well as their authors, are a likely source for the type of information DLS is seeking in this initiative,” said Boone.

"This information should assist laboratory managers identify practices that have proven themselves in other laboratories," Boone explained. "Using these proven practices will reduce the cost to laboratories of doing studies themselves to find something that works. It should permit managers to have greater confidence in their practices and to devote more time to important quality assurance and patient care activities."

“In turn, the end result is the information may be used by CLMA members as well as laboratorians everywhere in assessing and selecting the most appropriate and effective practices for their institutions,” Boone said.

CLMA designed its “Good Practice Sharing” (GPS) program in 2007. CLMA’s GPS program encourages members to share successful laboratory projects with other members in an easily-accessible and well-organized database on its Web site.

Julie Gayken, chairman of CLMA’s Patient Safety and Quality Committee, co-led the movement with vice-chair Paul Epner toward CLMA adopting a GPS program. Gayken now sits on a committee of 12 the CDC recruited to define a process for identifying, evaluating and categorizing best practices.

“This landmark collaboration between the CDC and CLMA member resources will provide a transformational framework to allow sharing of information for improvements in laboratory medicine," Gayken said.

The CDC initially launched the study of best practices in 2006. CLMA joins the study in Phase II, which includes reviewing and revising evaluation methods developed in Phase I. It also includes conducting two topic area pilot studies to assess the proposed process.

The agreement between the CDC and CLMA began Jan. 1, 2008 and will last for at least one year. The “memorandum of understanding,” as the agreement is called, will allow for the recruitment of current CLMA members as potential participants in the CDC study.

The agreement also stipulates that DLS and CLMA will work together to:

• -Identify likely sources for the unpublished evidence DLS is seeking for two pilot studies.
• -Collect information from CLMA members on promising practices for which limited published evidence of effectiveness is available.
• -Compare multiple candidate practices associated with clearly defined demographics, criteria and outcomes.
• -Assist laboratorians in assessing and selecting the most appropriate and effective practices for their institutions.
• -CLMA and DLS will also work together to develop an evaluation plan to assess the effectiveness of this collaboration.