Contacting patients for serum specimens

Tue, 18 Oct 2016 17:45:59 GMT

Our lab is getting pressure (led by the renal transplant coordinators) to be responsible for contacting patients who have not had their samples submitted for monthly antibody testing. I am curious whether some labs do this, rather than insisting that the coordinators, who already know the patients, be the contact persons. I feel that it is not the lab's responsibility. Shannon Cooper, Ochsner Transplant Center

Tue, 18 Oct 2016 17:54:31 GMT

We give the coordinators a list of missing samples and they are the ones who call the patients or dialysis centers about it. don't think it's the lab's place to do it. What if a patient didn't send a sample because they were sick - then the lab would need to communicate that information back to the coordinator.

Tue, 18 Oct 2016 17:59:43 GMT

We do the same as Susan's lab and I agree with her that it isn't the lab's place to be doing this.

Tue, 18 Oct 2016 18:00:39 GMT

We do not contact patients. Our coordinators handle this.

Tue, 18 Oct 2016 19:26:56 GMT

Our transplant program recently hired an administrative aide to help with this as well as other tasks related to waitlist maintenance, and it has been very successful. We also created an Epic report that they can run on their own every month to figure out which patients are behind on submitting their samples.

Wed, 19 Oct 2016 17:30:18 GMT

We do not contact the patients - same answer as Susan and others.

We support 3 transplant centers, and every Wednesday we query our Histotrac database and have a set report that lists patients with expired sera per center, and this report gets emailed to the clinical programs.

Occasionally we may call the dialysis center to communicate about having specific samples drawn such as cells for auto crossmatches, but even in these cases it's the clinical staff that communicates with the patient.

Thu, 20 Oct 2016 18:36:48 GMT

We never contact patients directly, the coordinators do this. We serve 4 programs and we email them every two weeks the list of patients with information on how old their serum samples are, highlighting those that need fresh sample drawn, and then the coordinators contact them.