Laboratory Quality Journey

Nancy Johnson
0:00

Welcome to CAP News. I'm Nancy Johnson with the College of American Pathologists. Here's what's making news in pathology and laboratory medicine. When most of us get a blood test or biopsy, we don't think much about what happens next. The sample goes out the door. A few hours or days later, the results show up in our chart. But behind every test result is an entire system designed to answer one critical question. Can patients trust the results? For CHRISTUS Health in Northeast Texas, ensuring consistent, reliable lab results across multiple locations presented them with a challenge.

Patusa Mayfield
0:39

I don't want to be selfish, but navigating three or four accrediting agencies is a lot of work. And I wanted to standardize not only the main hospital but all the smaller hospitals, the 35 plus clinics that we have that are Christas Trini clinics, all under one accrediting agency.

Nancy Johnson
1:00

Patusa Mayfield is the laboratory director for CHRISTUS Mother Frances. The health system performs roughly four and a half million lab tests every year. A key decision they made for consistent quality is accreditation by the College of American Pathologists.

Patusa Mayfield
1:17

CAP provides standardization, they provide standards that make you be better. At first, you know, when you read all these standards, you think, oh, how can we meet this? But there's always such a synopsis or a story behind the standard that says, you know, different ways of looking at the requirements. Even if you don't understand the standard, CAP provides a tremendous resource. They have education, they have an accreditation section that devotes themselves just to explaining the standards and making you understand it.

Nancy Johnson
1:55

For patients, those standards are largely invisible. Most never see the safeguards built into every step of testing. Dr. Kelli Chase is a pathologist and laboratory medical director for CHRISTUS Mother Frances.

Dr. Kelli Chase
2:10

A lot of patients don't have much knowledge about the hospital laboratory or the laboratory where their blood or their biopsy specimens go, and uh because uh we're not interacting directly with them. And so it's it's interesting, I think, for maybe them to know that the lab is not just a great big black box that does magic.

Nancy Johnson
2:34

Behind the scenes are multiple quality checks. A key component of the quality journey for CHRISTUS Health involved choosing a proficiency testing provider.

Dr. Kelli Chase
2:44

Of course, College of American Pathologists has a long history with quality measures, proficiency testing, working with pathologists at multiple laboratories in different environments, as well, uh including uh hospital environments and outpatient laboratories, large and small, uh, and far and wide.

Nancy Johnson
3:03

And CHRISTUS isn't standing still. The health system is adding beds, opening new facilities, and expanding services across Northeast Texas. For Mayfield, that's exactly why building a unified quality framework matters now more than ever.

Patusa Mayfield
3:20

So we're a large institution, and like I said, 654 beds, but adding an additional 150 is going to bring our complexity even higher. So we want to make sure that we're ready for that growth and that strategy that's coming forward.

Nancy Johnson
3:36

Starting next year, all 48 sites in the CHRISTUS Texas region will be CAP accredited and will use CAP proficiency testing. They're on a journey to bring their entire health system under the CAP for quality. That does it for the Daily Edition. Share this newscast with your social media network. And if you're watching this video on YouTube, hit the like button and leave us a comment. And if you've got a story we should be covering, write to us at stories at CAP.org. We're back tomorrow at 5 a.m. Eastern for another episode of our newscast. I'm Nancy Johnson. Have a great day.