By Diagnostics World Staff
June 9, 2016 | Invitae Corporation launched CancerCHECK (Cancer Complete Hereditary Evaluation Clinic Kit), this week, a comprehensive toolkit that provides checklists, information, and customized support for clinicians considering genetic testing for hereditary breast, ovarian, and colorectal cancers.
It’s a customer service offering, Invitae CEO Randy Scott told Diagnostics World. “The field is moving so fast, we wanted to put together a really good customer experience for those clinicians who say, ‘I think this patient should get a genetic test, but I’m not quite sure which gene to order.’”
Scott sees the genetic testing market spreading to smaller clinics and more community healthcare settings. At the end of May, Invitae announced that it completed the comprehensive Clinical Laboratory Evaluation Program and received its clinical laboratory permit from the state of New York, now offering testing in all 50 states. It’s a very broad potential customer base. “We’re starting to get a lot of crossover into community practices and groups where they’re not quite as knowledgeable about genetics.”
CancerCHECK is a free, physical toolkit for practices to have on hand that will walk doctors and medical office staff through the steps to choosing, ordering, and interpreting genetic tests. Based on NCCN guidelines and the needs identified in the 2015 ASCO genetic and genomic testing policy statement, CancerCHECK starts with a family history questionnaire and leads doctors through which tests to order based on family history responses, how to order tests efficiently, and how to process reimbursement. (Invitae offers pricing for in-network payers and institutions; out of network payers and institutions; and a patient-pay model.)
The checklists and guidances will be hard copy resources. While CancerCHECK will exist online as well, Scott said many of the practices Invitae is hoping to reach with this service still rely heavily on paper: about 40% of offices still order tests with paper.
“The whole thing is really meant for medical practice office staff,” Scott said. “We wanted to really be able to provide a service for them so that they can order the right test in a fast and efficient manner that won’t take up a lot of their staff time.” For a practice that orders one test a week, or one a month, pulling out a check list may still be the easiest way to walk through the process.
Scott expects the toolkit to be most useful to new customers or customers that order infrequently. For practices that don’t have access to genetic counselors, CancerCHECK should make the process of choosing the right test and delivering the results more straightforward.
The CancerCHECK toolkit is not making recommendations to doctors other than those already established by the community, and the company’s customers still have access to Invitae’s 30 staff genetic counselors who can answer questions and clarify concerns. The toolkit is meant to take the guesswork out of the initial steps to save physician practices time, and let Invitae’s genetic counselors focus on harder questions.
“We really want them to be able to focus on the top, outlier questions that are very unusual cases,” Scott said. “This is a way to really get out ahead of our customer service team and provide logistical support that people needed in a more automated fashion, so that we can reserve our customer service for helping with the tough issues.”
And he expects customer service to remain busy. The market is expanding extremely rapidly and starting to affect many medical areas starting with oncology, cardiology, and urology, Scott said. “There are now fairly frequent, fairly common genetic conditions for which we could be testing more routinely. We look at it as a really great opportunity to really help educate the medical profession and provide support and service, doing so in a really medical responsible way, referring them back to peer reviewed publications and clinical guidelines.”