CAP Today Recommends

Dec. 7, 2015—An editorial in the Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, co-written by Donald Henson, MD, and Philip Grimley, MD, says “image integration based in pathology and radiology should occur concurrently with convergent images specifically selected to highlight pathogenesis and natural history.” Read the editorial.

Sept. 4, 2015—Pathologist Brad Brimhall, MD, MPH, will share in an upcoming webinar how he and his colleagues at the University of Mississippi Medical Center combined health care data sets to improve patient outcomes and cut costs. Dr. Brimhall also will discuss how laboratory leaders can identify opportunities to collaborate with others in their health care organizations to develop medical analytics projects. The webinar, scheduled for Sept. 15 at noon CDT, is hosted by Orchard Analytics, a new business unit

Sept. 3, 2015—Upcoming webinars offered by the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute will focus on helping laboratory professionals develop their own individualized quality control plans and provide them with new ways to deal with antimicrobial susceptibility testing challenges. A Sept. 15 webinar, “Developing Your Laboratory’s IQCP for Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing,” will be presented by Susan E. Sharp, PhD, ABMM, FAAM, director of the regional microbiology and molecular infectious diseases laboratories at Kaiser Permanente in Portland, Ore., and Linda C. Bruno,

Aug. 6, 2015—An upcoming webinar aims to help participants recognize how timely data derived from electronic problem or deviation management can drive quality improvement initiatives. The information also can boost productivity and efficiency in blood banks and transfusion services, says health care consultant Lieta M. Maffei, MT(ASCP)SBB. She will lead the webinar, sponsored by Nouvation, which makes and sells occurrence-tracking software. Register.

July 31, 2015—A new white paper and webinar offered by Orchard Software outline the factors shaping the point-of-care testing market, the benefits and challenges POC tests offer for labs, and the potential for harnessing data from POC tests for use in analytics. Read the white paper. Register for the Aug. 18 webinar.

May 20, 2015—In a recent interview, Exalenz Bioscience CEO Larry Cohen discussed his company’s innovations in testing for H. Pylori and clinically significant portal hypertension with its BreathID test. Read it.

May 20, 2015—The Association for Molecular Pathology recently published a special article that provides a thorough overview of research to date on the minimally invasive “liquid biopsy” approaches to cancer diagnostics. Read it. “As a group of molecular diagnostic experts, we were intrigued and excited by the emerging technologies that are likely to find utility in patient management,” Milena Cankovic, PhD, of the Henry Ford Health System and past AMP Clinical Practice Committee member, said in an AMP statement. “We

April 9, 2015—In a recent video, pathologist Michael J. Misialek, MD, offered some clinical practice insights geared to patients concerned about the recent JAMA study on the accuracy of breast biopsies. Watch.

March 24, 2015—Researchers evaluated how well eight competing electronic health records systems met 11 objective criteria for optimal graphs of diagnostic test results, and found that none hit the mark on all measures. Among the problems: results graphed in reverse chronological order and misleading data plots. Only two of the EHRs allowed users to hover over or click on a data point to see the precise values of the x-y coordinates. Many commercial EHRs have significant limitations in graphing capabilities