Areas of Interest

Specimen Management

Comparative safety and performance studies of:

• BD Vacutainer® Blood Collection Needles, Blood Collection Sets and Accessories:
  • Sample quality
  • Fill rates and fill volume
  • Pain perception
  • HCW Safety (NSIs)
  • Diagnostic accuracy
  • Efficiency
  • Total Cost of Ownership
  • Ease of use and first stick success in cases of difficult vein access (for UltraTouch)
• BD Vacutainer® Blood Collection Tubes, including those intended for collection of serum, plasma and anticoagulated whole blood
  • Accuracy, reproducibility, sample stability and robustness for high sensitivity immunoassays or assays targeting analytes sensitive to cellular contamination
  • Impact of sample quality issues such as hemolysis, fibrin, underfill, gel artifacts etc. on laboratory practices and efficiencies
  • Total Cost of Ownership
• BD Vacutainer® Urine Collection Solutions, including those intended for urinalysis and for culture and sensitivity testing
  • Impact on urinalysis sample contamination from using preservative vs. non-preservative tubes
  • Impact of using proper midstream/clean catch technique on sample contamination
  • Impact of using open vs. closed system collection on sample contamination
  • Workflow improvement/efficiencies and healthcare worker safety
• PAXgene specimen collection products for nucleic acid stabilization including tubes, devices and purification kits
  • Liquid biopsy assay sensitivity for ccfDNA, methylated ccfDNA or multimodality assays in oncology patients and other populations, or paired with treatment outcomes
  • Impact of preanalytical errors on liquid biopsy lab practices and efficiencies
• ABG syringes: Comparison of regular syringe flushed with bulk heparin solution to professional syringes (Addressing the topic through studies other than clinical studies)
• ABG collection devices to BD ABG syringes with LiH anticoagulant for the assessment of the following metrics (ABG Collection Syringes: BD A-Line^TM Arterial Blood Collection Syringes and BD Preset^TM Arterial Blood Collection Syringes):
  • Workflow
  • Sample quality
  • Analyte performance
  • Impact on instrument maintenance / down time
  • Economic impact

Women’s Health & Molecular

• Impact of patient awareness campaign for OBGYN settings for Vaginitis or Vaginosis and CT/GC screening rates using molecular tests
• Comparative performance of HPV+ triage in cervical cancer screening – extended genotyping versus dual stain cytology and methylation
• HEOR analysis of the extended genotyping colposcopy referral in real world settings – impact on long-term patient care and outcomes
• HEOR analysis of self-sampling in national screening programs – long-term follow-up and cost effectiveness as an adjunct to current standard of care
• Anal Paps and HPV testing in the management of anal cancer (screening and treatment in the post-ANCHOR study era)
• Meta-analysis of SurePath, ThinPrep and conventional cytology for the diagnosis of cervical disease.
• Use of serial extended genotyping for patient management (modeling study -can extended genotyping and persistence monitoring replace current standard of care triage strategies?).  Strategies for both developed and developing screening programs (e.g., top tier risk immediately referred for VIA/treatment in LMICs)
• Development of cloud-based cell phone results reporting systems for self-collection in LMICs (test kit ordering, centralized results reporting and transmission to individual cell phone users for management and recall)
• Viral load in the management of HPV+ patients
• The utility of extended genotyping for the management of head and neck cancers
• Preference of women for self-collection – urine versus vaginal swab collection
• Health economics and outcomes research (cost, patient outcomes, reimbursement, etc.): Enteric targeted panels (BD MAX™ EBP, xEBP, EVP, EPP) vs. broad panels (i.e., BioFire® FilmArray® GI Panel or Luminex xTAG® GPP)
• Geographic stewardship of enteric assays: Geographical distribution of enteric organisms
• BD MAX® Suite of Enteric Assays (EBP, xEBP, EVP, EPP) compared to traditional culture methods: Performance, patient outcomes, outcomes to assess measure: time to admission/transfer; impact of additional diagnostic tests to ascertain cause of infection time to confirmation of antibiotic therapy; impact on antibiotic consumption
• Workflow analysis of enteric screening with BD MAX® Suite of Enteric Assays (EBP, xEBP, EVP, EPP) using the BD FecalSwab™ and reflex testing to traditional culture on automated specimen processing systems (i.e., BD Kiestra™)
• Benefits of using molecular as first screening vs. culture: BD MAX™ MRSA-XT and/or Cdiff MAX
• Geographical stewardship of BD MAX™ CPO assay as a screening assay: Geographical distribution and prevalence of CPO in the United States
• Patient management and outcome differences with BD Vaginal Panel compared to other molecular VP assays
• Advantages of Candida spp. differentiation with BD Vaginal Panel
• Workflow studies with BD CTGCTV2 and BD Vaginal Panel with BD Molecular Swab (with or without comparator molecular method)

Clinical Microbiology

• Impact of adoption of automation of microbiology for ID/AST, especially for patients with CRO/CPO/resistant bugs coupled with strong AMS teams- endpoints rate of time to therapy change, rate of therapy change, average time from ID/AST results to therapy change, correlated patient outcomes by subgroup and controlling for underlying comorbidities, by major bug type
• Chart review, identifying, quantifying and measuring the clinical impact of false negatives in blood culture for suspected blood stream infections (BSI)
• Economic impact and quality error reduction through implementation of training programs offered by industry (BD Service teams, PAQC, BSI, etc.)
• Impact of automation and AI (imaging) on sample TAT, quality and efficiency KPI
• Use of MBT Sepsityper™ in Molecular workflow of positive blood culture bottles: i.e., using MBT Sepsityper™ prior to testing positive blood culture bottles on molecular assays to first screen for available targets (increase the pre-test probability of the molecular assay). Address overall time savings, cost savings, actionable results when organism are identified on MALDI that are not targets on the molecular assay

Point of Care

• Prospective value realization of adoption of point-of-care testing in retail pharmacies (plus care models for triage and patient management especially with telehealth) – Endpoints around workflow, patient access, billing realization, and patient and provider/pharmacist satisfaction/convenience/usability
  • Ideally starting with acute infections, longer term registrations that follow downstream outcomes of patients via claims tracing for routine testing and monitoring of common comorbidities vs total metabolic panel would be great too
  • Could extend this to at home testing space as well 

• Enterprise-wide inventory optimization
• Best practices in end-to-end medication safety
• Strategies and technologies to prevent opioid diversion
• Medication management in non-acute care settings/ care continuum
• Best infusion practices to deliver specialty therapies and/or treat special patient populations