VOTE for MARY E. EDGERTON for CAP BOARD of GOVERNORS
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VOTE for MARY E. EDGERTON for CAP BOARD of GOVERNORS 〰️
Last month I…
May, 2024
Photos from the ONC Cancer Data Exhange Summit May 12, my MD Anderson Retirement Party May 18, and my Association of Pathology Informatics Lifetime Achievement Award May 22
August, 2024
The CAP election opened up today. You can only vote once, but if you vote for me only it counts more!
Excited to say that I have another honor: I have been selected as One of the Best in Texas Doctors for 2024 for Excellence in Pathology!
The CAP continues to advocate for pathology in DC, where Dr. Karcher has testified before Congress about the damaging impact of moving LDT’s to FDA oversight. There has been some movement in Congress to stop this effort by the FDA. Write to your congressional representatives and Senators! Support the recommendation that the FDA partner with Congress to develop a platform for LDT oversight (https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/house-committee-fda-suspend-ldt-rule/721362/). And support the PathPac. They work in Washington DC for us!
I spent a wonderful vacation in England catching up with my friends-more like extended family for me! I also had a great visit with Dr. Laszlo Igali, Consultant Pathologist at the Norfolk and Norwich Medical School and the current Vice-President of the Royal College of Pathologists. What an incredible digital pathology with super report creation setup. In Norfolk I stayed with friends in their amazing 17th C farmhouse that they restored. I stayed over at Oxford with friends and was able to see the Wilton Diptych, which is on tour. What a magnificent piece of art. Back to London with my goddaughters, and rounded it out with a tour of Cornwall with my niece and her fiancee. Check out my Facebook page for photos from the trip!
May 12, 2024. Here I am with Cmdr Brandy Peaker at the Cancer Data Exchange Summit in Washington, D.C. as a CAP representative. The members of the Cancer Registry Workgroup unanimously voted that the CAP Cancer Protocols become the gold standard for cancer pathology reporting in the USCDI+ Cancer Domain. This was a tremendous attestation to the value of the 40+ years of effort that CAP has put into the development of best practice guidelines for reporting cancer data. I love being selected to represent the CAP to our government agencies. It is truly a great honor for me.
May 18, 2024. My friends and my MD Anderson colleagues joined me in Houston for a celebration of my retirement from MD Anderson. Tim Law, M.D., at left is now a practicing pathologist in Southern California and came to celebrate with me! At right I am dancing with Danny Polk, who is married to my colleague Charlene Brown-Polk from our Institutional Tissue Bank working days when we moved the multiple tissue banks to a central enterprise informatics system. A shout out to Toni Castaneda and Dolly Chawla from the Tissue Bank and from IT, who also came. Along with Enola Cushenberry, who was unfortunately out of town, we were the DREAM TEAM of Tissue Banking and Tissue Banking Informatics. Enola Cushenberry
was the Bank Manager who achieved recognition for the Tissue Bank as part of the MD Anderson CLIA lab license, and I added the inventory system to our CLIA approved software. A great big THANK YOU to all of you who came out and celebrated with me! This was right after the “derecho” hit Houston, and many of us, including me, were still without power.
May 22-I had the great honor of receiving the Association of Pathology Informatics Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by the API President Dr. Ji Yeon Kim. Dr. Kim honored me by mentioning by advancements in tissue banking informatics, the use of machine learning in assessing gene expression data, mathematical modeling of tumors, ethics in the development of AI products, and the advancement of data standards in structured format that can be reused as real world data in the development of decision support software and other AI products along with my breast pathology practice experience. My expertise and accomplishments in these areas are the reasons that I am running for the Board of Governors. With AI being considered as a possible LDT-we need that expertise! By the way, I am the second woman in 23 years to receive the award, and the first female MD.
April, 2024
I started the month at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) in Omaha doing one of my favorite things-teaching residents! As a breast pathologist and pathology informatician, I share my experiences in these two focus areas along with others with our trainees at UNMC. I have also been working with our surgical pathology staff to prepare a request for a faxitron to evaluate our breast specimens. I am very excited about this upcoming addition to the grossing laboratory.
On April 8th I travelled to Llano, Texas for a camping trip on some beautiful property on the Llano River to see the solar eclipse. We were expecting a cloudy day, but the clouds parted for all of totality. Here are a few photos from this memorable trip. There is a de rigeur campfire the night before the eclipse, a sunrise walk along the Llano River, bluebonnets at near peak blooming, and then the eclipse in progress, and totality. Science is wonderful!
Next on my agenda was a trip to Washington DC for the CAP Pathology Leadership Summit 2024 and Hill Day! I love Hill Day, April 16 this year, It is not only a great experience; I am also honored to be a member of the CAP team advocating for our profession and my colleagues. With membership in Texas and Nebraska Societies, I attended meetings with Senator Ted Cruz, Representative Al Green, Senators Deb Fischer and Pete Ricketts, and Representative Sheila Jackson Lee to advocate for the College of American Pathologists. Specifically, our asks were to co-sponsor and work with congress to pass H.R. 2474, the Strengthening Medicare for Patients and Providers Act, and H.R. 6371, the Provider Stability Reimbursement Act of 2023 to apply an inflationary update to the physician fee schedule, modify the physician fee schedule’s budget neutrality requirements, and mitigate the Medicare cuts, and S.1000/H.R. 2377 the Saving Access to Laboratory Services Act (SALSA).We need to improve how data is collected and validated under the Protecting Access to Medicare Act (PAMA; P.L. 113-93), to ensure an accurate, market-based payment system for laboratories paid through the Medicare clinical laboratory fee schedule (CLFS). This would allow laboratories to focus on providing timely, high quality clinical laboratory services for patients, and building the infrastructure necessary to protect public health. Finally, to address the declining physician workforce, we urge congress to pass S. 665/H.R. 4942, the Conrad State 30 and Physician Access Authorization Act, that reauthorizes the Conrad 30 waiver program for three years and increases the number of waivers granted to each state.
