From the President’s Desk

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A path for innovation

Emily E. Volk, MD

May 2022—In the 1990s, as immunohistochemistry was first adopted in clinical laboratories, there was palpable fear among many pathologists who believed our expertise would no longer have a role in health care. The prevailing sentiment at the time was, “If the brown stain lights up, you know it’s cancer, and they won’t need pathologists anymore.”

Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth. Having IHC capabilities meant there was more information that we had to process. It enabled us to extract more information from a tissue sample and to do more for our patients, but it also required more of us in terms of test selection, test interpretation, and communicating what it all meant to our fellow clinicians. More recently, next-generation sequencing has given us more, not less, to do; far from replacing us, such innovations require more of us to realize their full potential. These additions have not necessarily made our lives easier, but they have absolutely made what we can offer our patients richer and more precise.

We’ve been talking about innovation quite a bit lately within the CAP. You may have heard that we have a new Council on Informatics and Pathology Innovation. That’s part of a comprehensive innovation strategy that the CAP is currently developing to ensure that pathologists have the tools they need to consider whether novel approaches are useful for their patients.

It can be challenging to discuss innovation—in part because people often have knee-jerk reactions to it and in part because it’s not always clear what counts as “innovation.” Consider how dramatically our communications tools have evolved in the past 20 years. But the steady march from faxes to emails to text messages was made through incremental changes that didn’t seem radical at the time.

Dr. Volk

In the world of health care, innovation can touch just about every aspect of what we do—from how we receive information about patients and how we communicate with other clinicians to the data we use to inform our final diagnoses and how we deliver those diagnoses to patients.

Did you ever imagine that we would use short videos to reach our patients? I didn’t. But we are seeing some physicians use TikTok, and the CAP is looking into how we can harness this short video methodology for the good of our patients, our laboratories, and our member physicians.