NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The College of American Pathologists today said it has been awarded two grants totaling more than $1.25 million by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to improve the adoption of evidence-based laboratory testing guidelines.
The awards, which cover a five-year period, will also be used to standardize the reporting of biomarker test results to cancer registries.
CAP develops evidence-based guidelines and consensus recommendations in order to standardize laboratory practices. It has released six such guidelines to date, and the grants will be used to increase awareness of those guidelines as well as others in development, said Raouf Nakhleh, a pathologist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., and the lead on CAP's CDC project.
With the grants, CAP and other healthcare organizations are also developing a standardized approach to streamline the collection and recording of cancer biomarker data, CAP said.
"The CDC grant will enable us to develop and maintain standards and best practices for reporting cancer biomarker test results to cancer registries," Patrick Fitzgibbons, a pathologist at St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, Calif., who is involved in CAP's CDC project, said in a statement. "Our long-term goal is to standardize the reporting of cancer biomarker data and eliminate the need for manual abstraction of biomarker data, reducing errors and costs and, ultimately, improving patient care."