Publication Date: 
Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Public health laboratories face considerable challenges to ensuring performance of critically important testing services. These challenges stem from financial constraints and uncertainties, ever more sophisticated electronic systems, and new demands on laboratory professionals, among other factors.

This Policy Guide is a resource that public health laboratory directors and their colleagues can use as they explore legal and other policy questions related to state public health laboratories’ sharing test services with each other. Among the resources included are a checklist and self-assessment template. The Policy Guide also includes a list of actual test service sharing MOUs and contracts that exemplify how individual public health laboratories have addressed such concerns.

Qualitative research for this Guide was conducted by Justeen Hyde, PhD, Senior Scientist, and Eileen M. Dryden, PhD, Research and Evaluation Scientist, Institute for Community Health, Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their research was funded by PHLR. Jennifer Ibrahim, PhD, MPH, Associate Director of the Public Health Law Research Program, guided development and execution of the Policy Guide research plan.
Citations: 
Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL); Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Policy guide for public health laboratory test service sharing. Silver Spring, MD: APHL; 2014. Available at: http://www.aphl.org/lei.