How Can Laboratory Medicine Practices Be Corrected More Quickly?
More Programs and Publications Featuring Dr. Brandy Gunsolus
In this program:
What are some ways that laboratory medicine practiced might be corrected more quickly? Laboratory medicine scientists Dr. Brandy Gunsolus and Dr. Dana Powell Baker discuss processes for adjusting race-based corrections and how the corrections may be expedited.
Transcript
Deandre White:
How do you think we can move towards improving that, if anything, faster? Because I've worked at facilities even recently or worked with large, large lab companies that I still see on patient lab reports have the little AA next to the eGFR measurement.
Dr. Brandy Gunsolus:
So if you're looking at historical data, it's going to be on the historical data, that's the way it was published at that time, that's what medical decisions were based off of at that time, so we really can't go backwards and correct all of that data in the patient charts, once it's in the patient charts, it's there, so you're still going to see it, especially in historical charts. Trying to prevent it from moving forward is the real challenge. Baker, do you have anything to add to that conversation?
Dr. Dana Powell Baker:
No, I'll just build on that and add, I know it is an ongoing discussion within the laboratory medicine community, and as we are seeing more hospitals and more facilities come on board, I think we'll see other facilities follow that model, because it's really just trying to determine the process for that conversion or changing over. I think with anything, it's hard for people to break away from old habits or old practices, especially in medicine where you have this, I'll say this variety of individuals and their clinical training and understanding and experiences and how they've become essentially relying on data to appear a certain way in medical reports, especially our laboratory reports, but it will take a collective effort for us to all move forward and just being relevant in our practice, but also being current in following those best practices. And now that we have determine that, it is best practice to come away from race-based or ethnicity-based calculators, when we look at the GFR for an example, eGFR rather, for example, I think that we will start to see that trend of more institutions coming on with that change.
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