Patient Advocate Michele Mitchell in the News

By Lynn McCain | February 2 2022

Michele Mitchell has been a member of the Department of Pathology’s Patient and Family Advocacy Committee (PFAC) for many years, working closely with Dr. Jeffrey Myers andMichele Mitchell and Jeff Myers.jpeg other members of the committee. In 2016, Myers introduced Mitchell to the American Society for Clinical Pathologists and invited her to work as a patient advocate volunteer with this organization. Since that time, Mitchell’s role with the ASCP continued to grow and she served on the ASCP National Pathology Quality Register – Data Accuracy Task Force, a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services grant focused on adding pathology laboratory quality measures to the CMS quality payment system, the NPQR steering committee, the Patient Champion Steering Committee Engagement and Outreach sub-workgroup, among others. Recently, the ASCP published Mitchell’s story in The Pathologist and as a series of videos. Mitchell described the impact of these projects, “The exciting opportunity here is the potential for outreach as there are 130,000 laboratory/pathology members of the ASCP.  What that means is the Michigan Medicine Department of Pathology PFAC efforts to advance the patient experience are being shared globally! The editor and I plan to collaborate further in 2022. I am so grateful to have this platform in addition to my work at UofM to move the needle on patient advocacy.   But, none of this would have been possible without Dr. Myers taking that first step in adding me to this national board. In addition, I will always be grateful to Michigan Medicine for igniting my passion to do more to advocate for patients. In this time where news seems to be endlessly negative and health professionals are combatting compassion fatigue, I wanted to be able to highlight the plethora of the Department of Pathology’s PFAC accomplishments.”

You can read her story here.

Her video series can be viewed here.