Tag Archives: VOUS

Duty to recontact (DTR) is one of those principles that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I feel should be an unquestioned standard of care. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, the practical part of me prefers to sweep it under the ethical rug (on Sundays, I give it a break and enjoy a wee bevvy of single malt Scotch). The devil lies in the details of time, effort, unremunerated cost, and frustration involved with trying to notify patients of significant re-interpretations of test results or the availability of new testing technologies. A recent systematic review of DTR by Ellen Otten and her Netherlandish colleagues concluded that, broadly speaking, patients value being recontacted whereas clinicians feel that DTR is desirable but impractical.

I was surprised to learn that the American College of Medical Genetics is the only professional organization that has issued a formal statement in support of DTR, initially in 1999, with an update in 2013 specifically addressing clinical exome sequencing and clinical genome sequencing (Readers, please let me know if I am mistaken). I am not aware of case-law or legislation that mandates DTR, but I would feel awfully uncomfortable if a law suit were brought against me for failure to recontact a patient. It is hard to ignore something that carries the label “duty.”

In a previous posting I suggested that  labs should refrain from reporting variants of unknown significance (VUS) because VUS should virtually never be used to guide clinical practice, and that labs should track VUS and alert clinicians to significant reclassifications. That blogpost generated interesting discussion on all sides of the issue. Collaborative databases such as ClinVar and PROMPT may help sort out the clinical relevance of human genetic variation, and to some extent relieve individual labs of part of the burden of dealing with VUS. But these efforts will only further the importance of clear and reasonable DTR guidelines. We are in this to improve the lives of our patients, and if advances in genetic knowledge are not used to help clinical care, then we have a  failure on our hands.

As a first step, let me offer some suggestions toward establishing reasonable DTR guidelines:

1. The primary – but not exclusive – responsibility of monitoring and reclassifying variants should lie with the original testing laboratory or whichever corporate entity might one day buy out the lab.  However, transparent sharing and curating of data among labs – such as with PROMPT and ClinVar – is critical and should be supported by government funding and built into the cost of testing. Classifying variants is enormously complex and the final word requires more than just a few smart people at a single lab rendering their opinions.
2. Labs should make good faith efforts to contact ordering clinicians – not patients – when a variant is reclassified. The clinician is responsible for integrating the test results into patient care. If the clinician is not reachable or no longer affiliated with the same institution or practice, then the original ordering facility should be notified. If efforts to re-contact clinical personnel fail, labs might then consider contacting patients directly, though this could be left up to individual lab policy. If all attempts to recontact fail, well so be it, but should be fully documented. If clinicians do not want to take on the responsibility of DTR, then, quite frankly, they should not engage in the practice of ordering genetic testing and should refer their patients to geneticists or other clinicians who are willing to assume this task.
3. DTR should be limited to situations where the reclassification of a VUS has direct clinical impact. Thus, there should be no DTR if a VUS is “down-graded” to a polymorphism or a benign allele. In my experience, the vast majority of VUS are down-graded. Alerting patients to every variant and then notifying them months or years later that the VUS was clinically irrelevant is not the best use of resources and manpower. However, DTR becomes critical if a VUS is “up-graded” to Suspected Pathogenic or Pathogenic, or – the more painful phone call to make – if a Suspected or Pathogenic allele is “down-graded” to a polymorphism (“Uh, that salpingo-oopphorectomy and mastectomy, well, maybe they weren’t so necessary after all.”).
4. There should a “statute of limitations” on how many years out from the testing date that DTR would apply. My daughter suggested 7 years from the time of the original interpretation; she tells me that this is consistent with the length of time that care providers are legally required to keep patient records. I might be persuaded in favor of five years, in light of the mobility of clinicians and patients, the inevitable business cycle of lab acquisitions/mergers/closures, and advances in genetic testing that will rapidly make today’s cutting edge techniques look as elegantly primitive as Clovis point technology.
   

   iClovis

5. When undergoing genetic testing, patients should fill out a form with their contact information. Patients should be actively involved in their medical care and this brings with it an obligation for patients to inform clinicians of contact information, along with details of who and how to contact if the patient becomes deceased, mentally incompetent, or otherwise unreachable.  Ideally clinics would contact patients every two years or so to update contact information. While this is theoretically straight-forward with electronic medical records (EMR), most EMR are far less flexible and surprisingly less able to allow such seemingly straight-forward database functions. Getting your IS department to extract individualized reports, mail merges, and data analysis from the EMR is almost as difficult getting the US Congress to pass meaningful legislation. And, to add another layer to participation in their own care, patients should be permitted viewing access to online VUS databases, which should be made user-friendly. It may not be what every patient wants, but it should be available for those who wish to pursue it. In this area, we could learn a lot from direct to consumer genetic testing labs, which are light years ahead of us in designing easy to use, highly informative, up to date websites and creating on-line communities.

Some of you will support a few of these proposals and think that others are about as good an idea as Discount Colonoscopy. But if we don’t do something then nothing will ever get done. What are your thoughts?

Once again, thanks to Emily Singh for doing the hard work on the graphics (really, isn’t iClovis très cool?).