Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings (LabCorp), the world's leading healthcare diagnostics company, announced an expansion of its long-standing partnership with the Perinatal Quality Foundation (PQF), an independent non-profit foundation, to collaborate on a new strategic initiative focused on noninvasive prenatal screening, the Genetic Education Module (GEM),.

PQF's GEM initiative will provide education to help patients and healthcare providers better understand the benefits and limitations of noninvasive prenatal screening and how to interpret the results of that screening. GEM will also build a patient registry designed to correlate the results of noninvasive prenatal testing with the results of confirmatory diagnostic tests, such as chorionic villus sampling (CVS) or amniocentesis, as well as post-partum outcomes. In addition, the initiative will help develop processes for credentialing healthcare personnel in the delivery of pre- and post- screening information. LabCorp and PQF are committed to improve patient outcomes and lives, while lowering costs, through expanded access to emerging healthcare technologies, such as their existing work on PQF's Nuchal Translucency Quality Review programme, which provides education and credentialing for sonographers and physicians involved in first trimester risk assessment.

"As new genetic technologies enter the market, it is imperative for industry leaders, such as LabCorp, to foster the use of genetic information and support the appropriate administration and interpretation of these technologies," said Dr. Ron Wapner and Dr. Larry Platt, members of the PQF board of directors.

"LabCorp is one of the founding supporters of PQF, and we welcome LabCorp's continued assistance in helping PQF meet its objectives of educating patients and providers."

"As a leader in integrated genetic testing and counseling services, we are proud to support another important PQF objective, facilitating physician and patient access to much-needed resources focused on noninvasive prenatal screening," stated Dr. Marcia Eisenberg, LabCorp Diagnostics' chief scientific officer.

"Genetic testing is a rapidly evolving area of medicine, and by working collaboratively with organisations like PQF, we can advance access to, and understanding of, high-quality test results for physicians and the patients they serve."

LabCorp is a leader in women's health and specialty genetics, and has extensive experience developing and commercialising innovative maternal diagnostic testing services, including noninvasive prenatal screening, the SNP microarray and expanded carrier screening, that is changing the way care is provided. LabCorp also offers integrated complementary services to testing, such as clinical programmes for maternal serum screening, cytogenetics, single gene testing and the industry's largest team of genetic counselors, who support patients and their physicians with analysis, assessment, and interpretation of genetic test results.