CAP TODAY Pathology/Laboratory Medicine/Laboratory Management
July 2018—CAP members know that laboratory quality improvement and accreditation drive much of what we do. Nobody can know everything about the science underlying our specialty because pathology embraces a vast body of knowledge that is always changing, so we rely on two CAP councils—Council on Accreditation (COA) and Council on Scientific Affairs (CSA)—whose volunteers have the expertise to know what is state of the art and what is on the horizon.
I plan to write two columns on laboratory improvement—this one mostly about laboratory improvement via proficiency testing and another soon on accreditation. Their roles ebb and flow; there’s a lot of back and forth. Together, they capture much of what is fundamental to what we do for our patients and the clinicians who care for them.
R. Bruce Williams, MD
Thirty-two discipline-specific scientific committees that report to the CSA oversee CAP proficiency testing programs. More than 600 CAP volunteers sit on these committees, and all are experts in their fields. They debate, design, and develop new tools for quality improvement, evaluating the programs for laboratory performance and utility each year and refining as needed. I greatly enjoyed my opportunity to chair the CSA, which oversees more than 650 proficiency testing programs administered to more than 22,000 subscribing laboratories worldwide.
Each scientific committee has its mission, and many partner with members of the COA to edit laboratory accreditation checklist requirements pertinent to their disciplines. These members also educate peers on the emerging science and its applications to medicine by writing articles, hosting webinars, and giving talks.
Our proficiency testing programs evolve in conjunction with our specialty. As Raouf Nakhleh, MD, our CSA chair, has said, the challenge lies in the variety of forms that laboratory testing can take and the number of new technologies coming into the field at once. This year the CAP is offering 25 new PT and quality improvement programs for 2019, including two new next-generation sequencing programs. There are four new Q-Probes educational programs in the catalog, including one that targets opioid testing stewardship and another to measure expression rates in invasive breast cancer.
An exciting expansion of our online ordering system for PT and quality improvement programs, learning opportunities, and publications will be fully launched next year. (To access the online store, go to www.cap.org, click on “Shop,” then log in to view and renew your order.) For those tasked with tracking these things, this one might be a game changer. You might also want to try the complimentary Performance Analytics Dashboard, a web-based reporting solution for CAP proficiency testing and accreditation performance with which to benchmark your laboratory against your peers and CAP-wide performance.