Amy Nett: Next question from Amber. Amber asks, “I know fasting is important for accurately obtaining certain labs such as lipid panel, iron panel, homocysteine. Are there any other labs that come to mind that you would want patients to be fasting for? Obviously, people will be fasting for the initial blood panel. I just want to make sure when doing follow-up testing, I know when fasting is required and when it’s not.”
That’s a great question, and I think really important so that you’re getting accurate labs. I don’t want to miss anything in terms of just off the top of my head trying to give you the list of labs that need to be fasting and need to be don’t. What I would actually recommend is go to either the Quest or the LabCorp test menu, because if you go to the LabCorp test menu, you basically type in the lab that you’re going to be running and then you’ll see that there is both a section that’s specifically on patient preparation and then another section on special instructions. For example, if you go to LabCorp test menu and then maybe you’ll type in thyroid panel, you can see the special instructions about “don’t take biotin for 72 hours prior to testing,” and as you mentioned lipid panel is fasting, so if you go to lipid panel on the LabCorp test menu, it’ll say “patient preparation fasting for 12 hours,” whatever it may be.
Again, I don’t want to just off the top of my head tell you what’s fast and what’s not and then I missed one of the labs that you’re running frequently, so I would suggest becoming familiar with the labs, at least the ones that you use most commonly, and then you can even create a frequently asked questions document or something that’s specifically for your patients so you could even create chart parts in MD-HQ that say “vitamin D lab requires fasting” or not or “avoid your vitamin D supplement for two days prior.” That’s not specific, but it was just an example. That way too you now know anytime you want to order a test how to figure out what’s the best way for patients to prepare for that, so it’s measured accurately. Hopefully that gives you a good resource to figure out how to do that going forward.