Members of UNMC’s Regional Pathology Services and leaders of the Kearney Regional Medical Center met in November to mark five years of a successful partnership.
The institutions joined forces in 2017, in part to address a lack of access to pathology services for residents in rural Nebraska. According to the Health Resources and Services Administration and Rural Health Information hub, the number of physicians per 10,000 people is 13.1 in the rural health care settings, a number that drops to 30 per 100,000 people in rural areas, and even to 263 per 100,000 people in urban settings for sub-specialties such as pathology.
“Since pathology uses laboratory testing to provide diagnostic information to patients and clinicians, it impacts nearly all aspects of patient care, from diagnosing cancer to managing chronic diseases,” said Tareq Qdaisat, assistant professor in the UNMC Department of Pathology and Microbiology, who joined the team at KRMC in July 2020 and began providing on-site pathology services for patients.
For many Nebraskans, accessing this type of specialized care can be difficult. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in May of 2021, the number of employed physician pathologists was 50 to 60 for the state of Nebraska, with most currently practicing in the Omaha and Lincoln areas.
The UNMC-KRMC partnership was created to address this need.
Joseph Khoury, MD, chair of the UNMC Department of Pathology and Microbiology, visited Kearney Regional Medical Center to celebrate the milestone.
“Our partnership with the team at Kearney Regional is based on mutual respect and a shared vision to deliver the best quality of medical care to the Kearney community and the region,” Dr. Khoury said. “We are proud of what we have achieved together and look forward to continuing this journey.”
The future of this partnership is bright, said Bill Calhoun, CEO at Kearney Regional Medical Center.
“We look forward to other shared endeavors, such as bringing on dermatology services at Platte Valley Medical Clinic/Kearney Regional Medical and providing corresponding pathology testing at UNMC and continuing to expand UNMC student clinical rotations at KRMC,” Calhoun said.
Examples of on-site pathology services include working with KRMC radiologists to review tissue samples in-real-time — often while a patient is still under local anesthesia — to ensure an adequate sample has been taken or reviewing lymph node samples ahead of potential lung surgery to determine whether a patient would benefit from surgery.
Dr. Qdaisat, also a subspecialist in molecular genetic pathology, works with oncologists to provide targeted therapy for cancer patients.
“All of these services are designed to help minimize unnecessary procedures and excess travel/recovery time and improve results for patients,” he said.
Technology also plays a key role, Dr. Qdaisat said.
“With the recent expansion of our digital pathology and microbiology services, we can run many additional tests in-house now at KRMC and provide same-day results to patients,” he said. “For things that we’d like to send out to specialists, we’re able to securely share those test results with physicians anywhere in the world.”
The partners marked the five-year anniversary of shared services by providing a free coffee cart for all KRMC staff, a lunch for the lab staff and an in-depth tour and meet-and-greet.
What a great partnership! Personnel in the pathology departments at UNMC and KRMC should be proud of this arrangement that provides support to rural Nebraskans!