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A scientific session at the 2020 AACC Annual Scientific Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo explores how clinical lab professionals can partner with their clinical colleagues to improve patient care and use of clinical lab expertise. Speakers from two academic medical centers and a pediatric cancer hospital will detail their efforts to improve patient care through concerted interventions that support their unique patient populations, including ways to improve the visibility of clinical laboratories.

Providing Value Beyond Values: Increasing Laboratory Visibility and Enhancing Patient Care (35229) takes place on December 17 from 2–3:30 p.m. Central Time and is worth 1.5 ACCENT credit hours. “We put together this session because we wanted other laboratorians to be aware that there are a variety of ways to increase the visibility of the laboratory and support the clinical team,” Zahra Shajani-Yi, PhD, DABCC, FADLM, former assistant professor of pathology, microbiology and immunology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, and one of the session presenters, told CLN Stat.

Each of the speakers worked in different environments that serve different patient populations, explained Shajani-Yi, who now serves as technical director of LabCorp in San Diego. “When I first became a medical director, I was only aware of the interventions at the hospital where I trained. I had to learn which interventions had the greatest likelihood of success at my new institution and what would best serve our patient population,” she said.

Shajani-Yi plans to discuss three interventions ranging from formal processes to more informal and localized outreach that her own institution built into its electronic medical record.

These are:

  • Institutions: How to integrate test results, patient history, and engage hematopathologists to write patient-specific interpretations for patients who undergo hemoglobinopathy testing.
  • Section specific: How to proactively review flagged HbA1C results that call for alternate testing, and the logistics of setting up and maintaining a daily review.
  • Individual: Participating in division conferences and teaching clinical fellows. “I will specifically discuss how my clinical collaboration with our endocrinology division began and evolved,” said Shajani-Yi.

Shajani-Yi hopes that attendees will come away with skills to implement these interventions.

In other presentations, Mark Cervinski, PhD, DABCC, FADLM, associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, will address low-stress options that enhance patient care. Alejandro Molinelli, PhD, NRCC-CC, FADLM, director of the clinical pharmacokinetics laboratory at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, rounds out the panel by talking about supporting a pharmacist-managed clinical pharmacokinetics service.