Clinical Pathology Selected Abstracts
June 2020—More than 1.7 million new diagnoses of cancer occur in the United States each year, and they are almost exclusively made by pathologists who evaluate patient specimens and issue a written diagnostic report. These patients often are not given the opportunity to talk with the pathologist who made the diagnosis or view their tissue through a microscope. There is little published data on patient-pathologist consultation programs in which patients can review their reports and slides with the pathologist. In addition, the number of patients who may be interested in this service is not known. The authors conducted a study to quantify patients’ interest in patient-pathologist consultation programs and qualitatively analyze their motivations for interest or disinterest.