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- 2022 CAP Distinguished Service Award
Established in 2006, the CAP Distinguished Service Award recognizes and honors a member of the College of American Pathologists (CAP) who has made an outstanding contribution to the practice of pathology. This award, established in 1965 (and amended in 2006), recognizes episodic, sustained, or cumulative contributions to the practice of pathology and to the College of American Pathologists that are sufficiently notable and extraordinary to set the nominee apart from peers. Nominees must be CAP members.
Mary E. Edgerton, MD, PhD, FCAP
The College of American Pathologists honors Mary E. Edgerton, MD, PhD, FCAP, with the 2022 CAP Distinguished Service Award for her long-standing contributions to patient care and advancement of pathology, and in recognition of her years of dedicated service to the CAP.
For over 20 years, Dr. Edgerton has been devoted to improving utilization of structured data capture information models to capture discretized data that are interoperable across electronic health care information systems. These systems use a standard data dictionary in cancer along with data modernization initiatives in health care. This effort has involved reconciliation between content experts and users, along with engagement of vendors to produce an interoperable information model.
Dr. Edgerton has participated in the Microarray Gene Expression Data Society (now the Functional Genomics Data Society) and the Tissue Microarray Data Exchange Standards. She was also the CAP’s Pathology Electronic Reporting (PERT) Committee liaison to the California Cancer Registry (as a member of a data modernization consortium) to address interoperable data, automated creation of registry cases from pathologists’ electronic submissions, involvement of major EHR vendors, and governance for access.
Dr. Edgerton participates in the High-Level Strategic Group for North American Cancer Surveillance, which governs changes to data elements and data dictionaries used by cancer registries. She contributes to recommendations of criteria and a framework for interoperability of laboratory data. She is also a member of the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Advisory Committee that reports to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and of the Implementation Subcommittee for the Systemic Harmonization and Interoperability Enhancement for Lab Data (SHIELD) project, reporting to Gregory Pappas, MD, PhD, in the Food and Drug Administration. Among her accomplishments, she is a 1979 Marshall Scholar.
The entirety of Dr. Edgerton’s extensive work has been channeled through the CAP, including her oversight of electronic Cancer Checklists new releases and the vendor engagement team, as well as her service in the following roles: formal liaison to the American Joint Commission on Cancer, formal liaison to the Oncology Leadership Council of CancerLinQ®, a subsidiary of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and a frequent representative of CAP membership to the Office of the National Coordinator in the Department of Health and Human Services regarding interoperability and information blocking rules specified by the 21st Century Cures Act.
Dr. Edgerton is a professor of pathology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and a proud member of the College of American Pathologists.
Sophia L. Yohe, MD, FCAP
The College of American Pathologists honors Sophia L. Yohe, MD, FCAP, with the 2022 CAP Distinguished Service Award in recognition for her many years of service to the CAP as chair and vice chair of the Personalized Health Care Committee (PHC), chair of the cross-council Molecular Work Group, and chair of the Molecular Pathology and Genomics Cluster.
While chair of the PHC, Dr. Yohe restructured the committee’s mission, fostering interdisciplinary relationships via two key multi-stakeholder projects (PD-L1 root cause analysis and the American Society of Clinical Oncology/CAP Summit on Immune Checkpoint Inhibition) and leading groups to explore the intersection of pathology and emerging technologies such as gene editing and CAR-T.
In addition to her role with the Council on Scientific Affairs, Dr. Yohe has been a member of the Council on Education since 2017, where she served on the Learning Portfolio Strategy Subcommittee and presented at CAP annual meetings in 2019 and 2020.
Dr. Yohe is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, where she serves as medical director for the molecular diagnostics laboratory and program director for the molecular genetic pathology fellowship.