NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Laboratory Corporation of America said today that it is expanding its existing collaboration with the Perinatal Quality Foundation to support PQF's educational initiative for noninvasive prenatal screening, called the Genetic Education Module.
The initiative aims to educate patients and healthcare providers about the benefits and limitations of NIPT screening and how to interpret the results. PQF will also build a patient registry to correlate NIPT results with confirmatory diagnostic tests and postpartum outcomes. In addition, it will help develop processes for credentialing healthcare personnel for delivering pre- and postnatal screening information.
LabCorp and PQF already have an ongoing collaboration for a Nuchal Translucency Quality Review program, which provides education and credentialing for sonographers and physicians involved in first trimester screening.
"Genetic testing is a rapidly evolving area of medicine, and by working collaboratively with organizations like PQF, we can advance access to, and understanding of, high-quality test results for physicians and the patients they serve," LabCorp Diagnostics CSO Marcia Eisenberg said in a statement.
Both Sequenom and Quest Diagnostics said earlier that they are also supporting the PQF's new NIPT initiative.
The PQF, an independent nonprofit foundation, aims to improve the quality of maternal-fetal medicine medical services by providing educational programs and monitoring systems to evaluate current practices and to facilitate the transition of emerging technologies into clinical care.