Dr. Ila Singh, chief of laboratory medicine at Texas Children’s Hospital, founded the Test Renaming for Understanding and Utilization in the Laboratory (TRUU-Lab) initiative several years ago to tackle challenges related to the nonstandardized and uninformative naming of laboratory tests. In this interview, Dr. Singh describes the surveys her CDC-funded collaborative has conducted with hundreds of physicians and other providers, and she shares insights about how to improve the ordering of tes...

Dr. Ila Singh, chief of laboratory medicine at Texas Children’s Hospital, founded the Test Renaming for Understanding and Utilization in the Laboratory (TRUU-Lab) initiative several years ago to tackle challenges related to the nonstandardized and uninformative naming of laboratory tests. In this interview, Dr. Singh describes the surveys her CDC-funded collaborative has conducted with hundreds of physicians and other providers, and she shares insights about how to improve the ordering of...

Individuals pursue careers in academic medicine for many reasons. A love of organizational politics is rarely one of them, but faculty need to understand potential landmines if they are to avoid them. In this interview, Dr. Michael Cohen, a professor emeritus of pathology at Wake Forest University, draws on his experiences serving on faculty and in senior leadership at multiple institutions to explain how to thrive within the paradoxes of academic medicine.

Individuals pursue careers in academic medicine for many reasons. A love of organizational politics is rarely one of them, but faculty need to understand potential landmines if they are to avoid them. In this interview, Dr. Michael Cohen, a professor emeritus of pathology at Wake Forest University, draws on his experiences serving on faculty and in senior leadership at multiple institutions to explain how to thrive within the paradoxes of academic medicine.Click here to listen to this episode...

Sustainability is a hot topic for American corporations, and health systems are no exception. In this interview, Glen Garrick, system sustainability director for Intermountain Healthcare, explains how his and other healthcare organizations are addressing their environmental, social, and governance responsibilities. He also describes how clinical laboratories can make the most positive impact.Related Information:New Building Embodies ARUP’s Commitment to Environmental StewardshipARUP’s Environ...

Sustainability is a hot topic for American corporations, and health systems are no exception. In this interview, Glen Garrick, system sustainability director for Intermountain Healthcare, explains how his and other healthcare organizations are addressing their environmental, social, and governance responsibilities. He also describes how clinical laboratories can make the most positive impact.

Three and a half years after the emergence of COVID-19 is a good time to reflect on the capabilities of U.S. laboratories to respond to future pandemics. In this interview, Dr. Marc Couturier, medical director of Emerging Public Health Crises at ARUP Laboratories, explains how the U.S. laboratory sector has improved in its ability to respond quickly to emerging and reemerging infections, but he emphasizes the need to go further. He specifically explains why testing can’t be rapidly scaled up...

Three and a half years after the emergence of COVID-19 is a good time to reflect on the capabilities of U.S. laboratories to respond to future pandemics. In this interview, Dr. Marc Couturier, medical director of Emerging Public Health Crises at ARUP Laboratories, explains how the U.S. laboratory sector has improved in its ability to respond quickly to emerging and reemerging infections, but he emphasizes the need to go further. He specifically explains why testing can’t be rapidly scaled up ...

Laboratory testing can either lead to the correct diagnosis or take a clinician down a blind alley, depending on how carefully the tests are selected and performed. In this interview, a practicing neurologist (Dr. Tammy Smith) and a clinical laboratory immunologist (Dr. Lisa Peterson) explain some of the complexities of laboratory diagnosis of autoimmune neurologic disease, and how to ensure good diagnostic outcomes.

Nurses and laboratory professionals rely on each other to ensure accurate test results, but their relationships are sometimes challenging. As president of St. Alphonsus Medical Center in Nampa, Idaho, as well as a registered nurse with a doctorate degree in nursing practice, Clint Child often mediates when these two professional cultures collide. In this interview, he explains why nursing practice is less predictable and requires greater flexibility than laboratory practice. He also shares hi...

Nurses and laboratory professionals rely on each other to ensure accurate test results, but their relationships are sometimes challenging. As president of St. Alphonsus Medical Center in Nampa, Idaho, as well as a registered nurse with a doctorate degree in nursing practice, Clint Child often mediates when these two professional cultures collide. In this interview he explains why nursing practice is less predictable and requires greater flexibility than laboratory practice. He also shares his...

Physicians and patients expect laboratory tests to produce the same results, regardless of where they are performed. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case, even for FDA-approved assays. As the current chair of the College of American Pathologists committee for accuracy-based proficiency testing, Dr. Andy Hoofnagle is an authority on this industrywide problem. In this interview, he explains the root causes of inconsistent results across platforms, and how manufacturers, regulators, and pro...

Physicians and patients expect laboratory tests to produce the same results, regardless of where they are performed. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case, even for FDA-approved assays. As the current chair of the College of American Pathologists committee for accuracy-based proficiency testing, Dr. Andy Hoofnagle is an authority on this industrywide problem. In this interview, he explains the root causes of inconsistent results across platforms, and how manufacturers, regulators, and...

The key to successful clinical lab automation doesn’t lie in the instruments or the conveyor belt. It lies in clarifying what the organization most needs to improve (labor efficiency? turnaround time? reliability?) followed by optimizing those factors through modeling and planning. In this interview, Dr. Lauren Pearson, ARUP’s chief medical officer for University of Utah Health, shares lessons she has learned from her recent automation projects.To view this podcast episode on the ARUP website...

The key to successful clinical lab automation doesn’t lie in the instruments or the conveyor belt. It lies in clarifying what the organization most needs to improve (labor efficiency? turnaround time? reliability?) followed by optimizing those factors through modeling and planning. In this interview, Dr. Lauren Pearson, ARUP’s chief medical officer for University of Utah Health, shares lessons she has learned from her recent automation projects.

For her doctoral dissertation, Dr. Susan Edralin dove into the issue of communicating the value contribution of pathology and laboratory medicine to healthcare administrators. What she found in her conversations surprised her. In this interview, she lists some of the misunderstandings regarding laboratory value and describes how lab directors can raise the status of their laboratory operations and expert staff.To access this episode on the ARUP website: https://arup.utah.edu/education/po...

For her doctoral dissertation, Dr. Susan Edralin dove into the issue of communicating the value contribution of pathology and laboratory medicine to healthcare administrators. What she found in her conversations surprised her. In this interview, she lists some of the misunderstandings regarding laboratory value and describes how lab directors can raise the status of their laboratory operations and expert staff.

You know what a patent is, but do you know what’s patentable in the field of laboratory diagnostics? Or how patent law has changed over the years? In this interview, Dr. Bert Ley, a registered patent agent with decades of experience in the clinical laboratory industry, unpacks some of the mysteries of the U.S. patent system and how it ultimately benefits society.

Within our current healthcare institutions, patients’ voices are often drowned out by the voices of providers, scientists, and industry. Andrea Downing’s life work is to fix this. As a BRCA1 cancer previvor and a patients’ rights activist, she was a spokesperson for one of the plaintiffs in the U.S. Supreme Court case that ultimately overturned gene patenting. Years later, while moderating an online patient support group, she discovered a major privacy vulnerability in Facebook, which led her...

To most laboratorians, quality control is all about rules, metrics, and thresholds. To Dr. Fred Strathmann, on the other hand, it’s about gaining understanding of the underlying processes. In this interview, he shares examples of ways to think more deeply about measurements in order to drive organizational improvement.

ARUP Laboratories was recently recognized by Forbes Magazine as being among the country’s best workplaces for women. In this interview, ARUP’s president, Dr. Tracy George, explains how companies can create healthier models of work-life balance that support women (and men) in their personal and professional roles.

The curricula of pathology and laboratory medicine training programs are heavily weighted toward technical and medical knowledge. In this interview, Dr. Wayne Chandler makes the case for more emphasis on leadership training, and he shares experiences from his 40-year clinical pathology career that illustrate the impact of people skills.

The VALID Act currently being debated in Congress would increase the regulatory burden on clinical laboratories. In this interview, Dr. David Grenache from TriCore Laboratories and the University of New Mexico, together with Dr. Vince Stine from the American Association for Clinical Chemistry, explain why VALID would slow down innovation while it raises costs, and why VALID appears to be designed to benefit a particular industry sector rather than patients.

In 2022, laboratory professionals have more choices about whom to work for and whether to even continue working in laboratory medicine. In this discussion, Stephanie Whitehead, MBA, MPH, MLS(ASCP), executive director of pathology and laboratory services at University Health, San Antonio, describes what managers should be doing to recruit and retain exceptional staff.

Despite their explicit healthcare mission, clinical laboratories often fall short when it comes to employee mental health. Laboratory managers know how to troubleshoot an assay or write a procedure, but how many know how to support an employee with crippling anxiety or de-escalate an emotional crisis? In this discussion, Brysen Bocchino, CMHC, NCC, ARUP’s newly hired mental health clinician, describes an innovative model for recognizing and addressing mental health needs in the workplace.