CLN Daily 2024
The COVID-19 pandemic brought a surge of interest in remote sampling. At the time, patients didn’t want to come into a healthcare setting for a blood draw, but home sampling has continued to garner interest because of its potential to improve efficiency and enhance patient access to healthcare. These benefits also promote health equity because they make diagnostics more accessible and affordable to more people.
Stephanie Lee, PhD, of Thermo Fisher Scientific, will helm a round table discussion about remote patient sampling at ADLM 2024 so that technology providers can share their experiences with remote sampling — both good and bad — to make it more available to more people.
“We know there’s an interest in remote sampling and adopting this, but not everyone is jumping on it, and we want to understand why,” said Lee.
She and Shen Luan, PhD, senior director of clinical innovation at Thermo Fisher Scientific, who will also be at the session, want to know what challenges clinicians and laboratorians are facing in adopting remote sampling, and what can industry do about it. For example, lack of harmonization of guidelines is challenging, especially since different vendors are making different devices, she said.
At this discussion, Lee hopes different people from around the clinical laboratory world can discuss best practices and recommendations for optimizing remote sampling processes, and also consider future advancements in remote sampling techniques and automation technologies.
One reason Lee decided to pitch this session for an ADLM roundtable is because improving health equity is a focus for both Thermo Fisher Scientific and ALDM. Thermo Fisher wants to make a difference worldwide “with an emphasis on global health equity,” she said, which “aligns well with ADLM’s core values.”
Last year, Thermo Fisher held a satellite round table during the conference, but they wanted to invite other industry partners this year as part of an ADLM session. “We felt we needed to open that up to others who want to be part of this,” Lee said, to push the technology forward, and to make it more practical to use for more people.
Remote patient sampling can also address the gap in important health screenings, she said. Allowing patients to take a sample at home can make screening accessible to people who don’t live near a place where they can have their blood drawn, or to people for whom traveling to and from such centers is a barrier to care. “Remote sampling right now may not be as accurate as a blood draw,” she said, but if remote sampling could be used for screening, it could save people the time, cost, and stress of coming into a hospital or other healthcare setting.
Lee stressed that this is not a lecture or presentation, but a discussion, where she hopes that other industry partners will be ready to discuss, share, and brainstorm possible routes forward to make remote sampling more accessible to more people.
“We felt we can’t do this alone. This is a community we need to work with,” she said — adding that “the more input, the better,” which she hopes will happen at this session.
Jen A. Miller is a freelance journalist who lives in Audubon, New Jersey. +X: @byJenAMiller.