Clinical lab experts share results of EP Test for VERIGENE® System
At this year’s ASM Microbe meeting, two clinical lab experts presented updates and personal experiences about GI testing in a Luminex-sponsored workshop. The talks covered recent updates to clinical practice guidelines for infectious diarrhea and Clostridium difficile, the rationale for multiplex molecular tests, and a validation study of the VERIGENE® Enteric Pathogens (EP) Test on the VERIGENE® System.
Reduced Hospital Stays with VERIGENE
The first presentation came from Mir Noorbash, Director of Microbiology and Molecular at the Sutter Health Shared Laboratory. This reference lab serves Sutter Health, a large health system in northern California with 24 acute care hospital systems and 26 clinics or medical foundations. Noorbash provided an in-depth look at the Infectious Diseases Society of America’s new clinical practice guidelines for infectious diarrhea and a quick overview of the society’s updated guidelines for C. difficile, with special attention to considerations for when, how, and whom to test. For example, a patient with a particular travel history might need to be tested for a select but unusual set of pathogens, while an immunocompromised patient should be tested for a broad panel of pathogens.
Noorbash also spoke about the challenges of relying on bacterial stool culture, which in his lab is not only labor-intensive but also expensive due to California regulations about who can perform these tests. The lab has adopted culture-independent diagnostic tests, including the VERIGENE EP Test, to address these challenges. Advantages to this approach, he told attendees, include dramatically shorter turnaround times, ease of use, and reliability. Such tests are now part of the IDSA guidelines, and their use has been shown to reduce the length of hospital stays, he added.
Download a PDF of the Presentation – GI Pathogen Testing, New Guidelines.
Speedy Turnaround with Molecular Tests
In the second talk, Morgan Pence, Director of Clinical and Molecular Microbiology at Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas, shared data from her lab’s evaluation of multiplex molecular testing as an alternative to stool cultures. The lab serves a 400-bed pediatric hospital and previously performed about 3,000 stool cultures annually, but those take several days to produce useful results. Pence said that she had been hesitant about using multiplex testing for GI cases, but has since become a big fan.
Multiplex testing offers many benefits, most notably speedy turnaround time — which on its own helps to prevent the spread of infectious diarrhea, reduces the unnecessary use of antibiotics, and facilitates public health surveillance, she noted. In Pence’s lab, molecular tests cost more to run than stool cultures, but their use is still justified due to their improved sensitivity and specificity, faster run times, ability to test for norovirus, and contribution to a reduction in unnecessary follow-up testing and imaging. Her team brought in the VERIGENE EP Test in late 2016, starting with a validation study of 106 specimens including stool samples and rectal swabs. There were only three discordant results compared to stool culture, and further testing showed that the molecular test had been correct for two of those results. The study found accuracy was 99.1%, sensitivity was 98.6%, and specificity was 100%. Since then, the lab has run more than 5,500 specimens and Pence said there has been very positive feedback from clinicians and technicians alike.
We’d like to thank both speakers for their thoughtful and detailed presentations, and the many conference attendees who took time out of a busy event to join our workshop.
The presentations are supplied by the presenter listed and are not endorsed by Luminex Corporation.
Related Content
- Fecal Matters: Molecular GI Testing-An Approach Based on Clinical Guidelines [Webinar]
- In Indiana, Riverview Health Improves Patient Outcomes with the VERIGENE® System [Blog]
- Gastrointestinal Disease Portfolio [Web Page]
