As pathologists, patient advocacy and safety have quite unique meanings as compared to our colleagues on the wards and in the clinics. It is such a unique opportunity to affect further care and treatments, depending on how testing is used. I find the combination of patient advocacy within the clinics an opportunity for pathologists to possibly meet patients and learn from our clinical colleagues about how much the lab truly affects patient care.
At my institution, we have what is designated as “Diagnostic Management Teams” (DMT). At each DMT, our clinical pathology teams perform actions such as writing interpretations for difficult test panels or review the charts to make sure teams have changed their patients to the proper antibiotics. . In our coagulation DMT, we write the interpretations for complex esoteric coagulation studies to ensure: 1. the right tests were ordered, and if they weren’t, we recommend which are appropriate, 2. these complex tests are explained in a way that is understandable to our clinical colleagues and 3. proper patient care and safety for tests which are very critical to patients. To add a layer to this complex testing system, we also have the opportunity to attend benign hematology clinic with one of our attendings. I found this experience to be rather eye opening. Pediatrics hematology clinic is an interesting place whose patients are diagnosed with a wide variety of diseases. A vast majority of these pediatric patients have a parent who has been deemed a “bleeder” or a “clotter” at some point in their lives, or the patients themselves have exhibited such conditions. Often, the parents do not have a definitive diagnosis, and so the investigation begins. The hematologist, who also is one of the coagulation DMT attendings, will order panels which fit with clinical history not only on the patient but more often than not on their parents as well. This allows the DMT to analyze the nuances of the complex coagulation system, even down to multimer gels to figure out which type of von Willebrand disease a patient may have. Although these clinic visits may seem superficial, they give families such a comfort to know a classification of their disease, how it can be treated and if it has been passed down to the actual patient, their child. One such instance, we actually produced a family pedigree with the type of von Willebrand disease within them and then did confirmation testing. Seeing the delivery of information and subsequent relief on the patients’ faces is always a gentle reminder of how much we affect and advocate for our patients in the lab, which starts with the order or a “simple test.”
-Melissa Hogan, MD is Chief Resident in her fourth year in anatomic and clinical pathology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and will be starting her Cytopathology fellowship at VUMC in 2020. She is currently Chair-Elect of ASCP Resident Council. She is passionate about patient care and medical education.
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