CAP Today Recommends

Despite diminishing classroom contact with medical students in the preclinical years, pathologists continue to be asked to teach year one and two students about the diseases delineated in textbooks. During this period, they should be alert to opportunities to also teach students about what pathologists actually do for patients on a daily basis. The shift toward exposure to the actual practice of pathology might increase students’ interest in, and appreciation for, the specialty. Read more in “Preclinical medical students and pathologists: departing from the text” by Edward J. Gutmann, MD, director, cytopathology fellowship program, Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center and Dartmouth (Geisel) Medical School, in Cancer Cytopathology.

Bruce A. Friedman, MD, emeritus professor of informatics, Department of Pathology, University of Michigan Medical School, and member of LigoLab Information Systems’ advisory board, has written an opinion piece titled “Primary Medical Care in Transition: Effects on the Lab Test Ordering Market.” Read the piece here.

Xifin released a white paper titled “The Executive’s Guide to Molecular Diagnostic Market-Share Expansion: Critical Success Factors for Maximizing Revenue, Patient Access, and Physician Engagement.” Authors Kyle Fetter, chief operating officer, and Harley Ross, chief commercial officer, offer practical approaches, process enhancements, and payor strategies essential to growing novel diagnostic market share through proactive, purposeful, and technologically enabled engagements with patients, physicians, and payors. Download the white paper here.

Digital Pathology Connections, a worldwide community for professionals interested in the digital future of the anatomic pathology laboratory, debuted at the Pathology Visions 2022 conference, held in Las Vegas, Oct. 16­–18. Digital Pathology Connections (DPC) is a virtual community providing educational content and enabling discussions on trending topics in pathology.

Hear from Margie Morgan, PhD, of Cedars Sinai Medical Center and Matt Faron, PhD, of Medical College of Wisconsin about their experience with the Accelerate Arc, which provides automated preparation of positive blood cultures for direct MALDI-TOF identification. This webinar was originally presented as an industry showcase at ASM Microbe 2022.

As a first-year medical student, once a week my small group would meet with an attending physician to learn how to talk to patients respectfully and document that conversation in the history and physical examination. In those early years of medical school, my time was mostly spent in lecture halls, gross anatomy and microanatomy labs, and the library studying, so these weekly meetings held all the promise and anticipation of what practicing medicine and actually treating patients would bring. In one of those meetings, our leader made a comment that had a lasting impression: the words “always” and “never” have no place in the dialogue of strong science and the practice of good medicine. Always and never. Two words at opposite ends of a spectrum that imply absolute certainty.

Orchard Software released a white paper titled “The Rise of Molecular Point-of-Care Testing: Where Does Molecular POCT Fit in the Diagnostic Continuum?” The paper offers an overview of molecular testing, discusses infectious disease testing and molecular POC tests for COVID-19, and provides Orchard software solutions for molecular and POC testing. Read the white paper here.

Sysmex America will host a webinar titled “Those sticky, tricky platelets—solving the puzzle of platelet clumping” on Oct. 20, beginning at 12 pm Central time. The session will review methods for performing platelet counts as part of a CBC. The presenter, Becky Socha, MS, MLS(ASCP)^CM, BB(ASCP)^CM, of Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, will discuss scenarios for handling specimens with thrombocytopenia and how to troubleshoot EDTA-induced pseudothrombocytopenia. Other objectives of the webinar include how to recognize normal and abnormal platelet histograms and scattergrams, and how to recognize spurious versus abnormal platelet results and how to troubleshoot them.

In response to the rapidly evolving COVID-19 crisis, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a laboratory data reporting guidance for COVID-19 testing on June 4, 2020 to assure the timely and quality data reporting to state and federal public health agencies of SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic test results, using LOINC and SNOMED-CT in electronic reporting systems.