Selling the C-Suite to Support Your hsTnT Initiative

Contributing LabLeaders: Ibrahim Hashim, MSc, PhD, DABCC, FIBMS, CSc, FACB and Elsie Yu, PhD, DABCC, FACB

Leadership

Article highlights:

At most organizations, C-suite support is critical to hsTnT implementation.
The decision laboratory leaders must make involves whether to secure C-suite backing from the start.
Whether you get buy-in at the beginning or later in the process, it's important to make your case using relevant data.

High-sensitive troponin T (hsTnT) is a “disruptive" assay: Its implementation, in almost any organization, is bound to impact workflow and clinical practice across the enterprise. For that reason, most lab leaders agree, it's important that the people driving the biomarker's introduction come up with a plan for involving hospital administration, including quality experts, the chief medical officer, and emergency medicine and cardiology service line leaders. The administrators at the helm of your organization will want to see evidence of the initiative's clinical and economic benefits. If you hope to ensure that your project will be successful, you'll need to show them the value of hsTnT so you can count on their initial and ongoing support.

The question, then, involves making your “sales pitch." Should you approach the C- suite only once the assay is in use so you can demonstrate its efficacy with relevant data? Or is it better to talk with them at the start so you have their backing as you bring the project live? Here, two experts with experience leading hsTnT initiatives share their thoughts on the subject of C-suite buy-in.

One Approach: Wait for the Data

When her laboratory introduced hsTnT at Geisinger Health System, says medical laboratory director Elsie Yu, PhD, DABCC, FACB, it did so with the understanding that a meeting with executives wouldn't need to take place until a later date. The C-suite was too busy with other issues, she notes, and she already had support from the chairs of the organization's emergency and cardiology departments. “So I didn't have to escalate it further."

Thus far, Dr. Yu adds, they've collected promising data showing how hsTnT may be reducing their “door to discharge" times—and they're looking at test-lab data to determine if the assay's use has led to an increase in the number of small blockages doctors diagnose. Her plan, she says, is to eventually gather “clean data" around those studies and others to quantify the health and economic impacts of the test, and then “bring it to the C-suite to tell them that this is working as predicted."

Another Option: Get Buy-in at the Start

An alternative approach to securing top-level approval involves close collaboration from the very start, says Ibrahim Hashim, MSc, PhD, DABCC, FIBMS, CSc, FACB, medical director for clinical chemistry at Parkland Hospital and Health System. “We realized that this was going to be a project that would touch a lot of areas and require a lot of resources. So we reached out to the C-suite and really described the process and asked if they could help."

Among the top selling points his team highlighted for executives upfront was the impact hsTnT would have on patient wait times in the emergency room. And “they were very interested," he recalls, in research that illustrates how the assay could improve overall efficiency. “I think they realized that there would be cost savings, that it's going to have an impact on operations, and they really liked that."

Now, Dr. Hashim says, his laboratory is collecting hsTnT data, and they plan to return to the C-suite in the near future to show executives they were right to offer their support. “I think," he predicts, “we'll be able to show how the lab has impacted outcomes." Finally, he hopes, they'll have what they need to illustrate how hsTnT has made his team “a partner in patient-centered care."

On the Lab as Part of That Patient-Centered Outcome

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Ibrahim Hashim, MSc, PhD, DABCC, FIBMS, CSc, FACB

Parkland Hospital and Health System Point-of-Care Testing Director

UT Southwestern Medical Center

Contributing Lab Leaders

Ibrahim Hashim, MSc, PhD, DABCC, FIBMS, CSc, FACB

Parkland Hospital and Health System Point-of-Care Testing Director

UT Southwestern Medical Center

Elsie Yu, PhD, DABCC, FACB

Medical Laboratory Director and Clinical Associate Professor

Geisinger Health System and Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine

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