The Department of Pathology and Immunology at Washington University School of Medicine is proud to announce that Vahid Azimi, MD and Stephen Roper, PhD were part of a multidisciplinary team that was recently named a Univants of Healthcare Excellence Team of Distinction by Abbott.
The team sought to reduce the barrier in prenatal care for black women in Missouri, where they are three times more likely to die within one year of pregnancy than white women. By removing isolated Cannabis use (iCU) as a urine drug screen (UDS) indication, the team reduced racial disparity through the reduction of unnecessary Child Protective Services (CPS) activation, leading to 66% fewer CPS reports for Black mothers (now 4%) and 50% fewer CPS reports for White mothers (now 3%).
Pathology Informatics helped this initiative by facilitating changes in the electronic medical record that restricted ordering to approved indications only and creating methods for streamlined auditing and analysis of the initiative’s impact.
Read the full abstract here.
