As healthcare provider organizations rose to the challenge of developing and implementing their pandemic response plans, some routine care understandably took a temporary backseat. Screenings were no exception, as hospital labs had to quickly prioritize COVID-19 tests.
“Being presented with such a challenge forced everybody to question how to meet the needs of patients and public health, and how to think outside the box to get new infrastructures in place,” says Chris McGowin, PhD, director, medical quality and safety, Roche Diagnostics Corporation, Indianapolis.
As organizations look to the future, here are several strategies for making a successful return to critical routine screening protocols.
Embrace Nimbleness
As vaccination against the new coronavirus increases, the healthcare field’s attention most likely will shift from symptomatic testing to screenings, including programmatic screenings, such as routinely testing schoolchildren, according to McGowin. Meeting testing demands under these new scenarios will require agility.
“Of course, the future is not entirely predictable, but we’re shifting from this pandemic perspective to more of what will likely be an endemic, seasonal perspective, such as how we manage influenza,” McGowin says. “Therefore, we have to think, ‘How can all stakeholders in healthcare delivery be nimble and adjust our resources to embrace the new normal?’ And then we have to develop plans that allow us to flex testing capacity based on needs that we can’t yet foresee.”
Take Inventory
Hospital leadership teams who take stock of their current testing capabilities will be better positioned to understand their capacity and “right-size” the technology within their labs based on current and future public health demands, according to McGowin.
“This means taking inventory of all the options that are available to meet testing demands even though they might not be traditional pathways,” he says. For example, antigen tests are becoming more widely available for COVID-19 testing, so making informed choices about tasking specific tests to different modes or platforms will add flexibility and capacity on molecular instruments to accommodate renewed demand for HPV or sexually transmitted disease testing.
Pooled testing—where several patients’ specimens are combined and tested simultaneously for COVID-19, allowing technicians to generate a confident negative result for all the specimens in the pool—could free up space on lab instruments for other screenings.
Address Access
Knocking down barriers to access is another key strategy for returning to more robust screening protocols.
“We will always face the challenge of ensuring access to patients who are most at risk for severe or advanced disease—across all disease areas,” McGowin says. “COVID testing has exemplified this challenge, but it remains critical that we continue to remove barriers for routine screening such as for STDs or cervical cancer.”
To address access, McGowin says there are ways leaders can think beyond the traditional healthcare infrastructure, and get creative about how and where patients receive screenings.
“For example, can we take tests that are emergency-use approved today, such as COVID tests, and apply them to the at-home setting or another nontraditional setting? Can we have people pick them up so they don’t have to get out of their car? Or can they do a test at home and leave it in a drop box and combine that with a telehealth-type scenario?”
Assemble Key Stakeholders
As questions remain about how the pandemic will pan out, leaders will need to plan for many possibilities and multiple unknowns. McGowin recommends mobilizing a team of key stakeholders within the organization to work together to plan different scenarios related to COVID-19 testing and overall screening protocols.
“It’s about scenario planning,” he says. “If you chart out three or four plans, maybe the future won’t align exactly to one of the plans, but certainly the process of planning for different scenarios ensures that all stakeholders are better equipped to meet the dynamic needs of the future versus simply waiting for it to unfold.”
Capitalize on COVID’s Lessons
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an overall net increase in demand for laboratory testing in hospitals, and many institutions responded by bringing in extra lab equipment and staff, according to McGowin. He suggests leaders might be able to make the most of those resources to increase access and improve care for their patient populations such as reducing testing turnaround times and helping clinicians make medical decisions more quickly.
“Laboratories should be asking themselves, ‘Can we capitalize on those resources to offer more on our testing menus for our patients?’” McGowin says. “Ideally, physician leaders can work directly with laboratories to enrich what is available to their patients; COVID-19 demand is definitely an unknown, but the known is that people still need routine screening. So, it’s an opportunity to leverage the available testing capacity put in place for COVID-19 to expand services to patients and their healthcare providers.”
For more information, please contact Chris McGowin, PhD, director, medical quality and safety, Roche Diagnostics Corporation, Indianapolis, at (985) 212-4261 or chris.mcgowin@roche.com.