As Congress takes aim at revamping healthcare, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are launching an effort to establish best practices in laboratory medicine. This evidence-based initiative mirrors the comparative effectiveness research (CER)—one of the Obama administration’s priorities in overhauling the healthcare system—that evaluates affordable healthcare tests and treatments to determine their advantages and disadvantages. CER was allocated $1.1 billion under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Called the Laboratory Medicine Best Practices (LMBP) project, the goal of the CDC initiative is to provide evidence-based methods that laboratory professionals can use to evaluate practice effectiveness for improving the quality of health care, to build a more robust knowledge base for the field based on the results of systematic evidence reviews, and to improve health care quality outcomes by identifying pre- and post-analytic practices that effectively improve the use laboratory testing.

The LMBP project is an important way for laboratories to have a voice during this critical time, said Paul Epner, the project’s network administrator. “Although there are no guarantees, when the laboratory profession is isolated physically and intellectually from the medical community-at-large, it is easy to be ignored,” he explained. “Comparative effectiveness studies, patient-centeredness and optimizing the delivery of care are topics that are at the center of much debate in health care. Unless laboratory services participate in the activities, they can hardly be expected to be at the table for the debate.

Laboratorians are encouraged to register at www.futurelabmedicine.org to become engaged in the initiative’s activities and to be kept informed of the progress. Most immediately, the CDC is looking for labs to submit unpublished data and studies related to the three topics being studied during this pilot phase: patient specimen identification errors, communication of critical laboratory test results, and blood culture contamination. More information can also be requested from Epner by e-mailing him at pepner@ChicagoBooth.edu.