HHS Office of Inspector General Report Finds ‘Steep Decreases’ in Medicare Beneficiaries Receiving Clinical Laboratory Testing During COVID-19 Pandemic’s Early Months

OIG warns that without adequate clinical laboratory testing healthcare organizations could see more deaths and increased spending Clinical laboratory leaders and pathologists know that lab test volume decreased dramatically during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. That was primarily because community lockdowns stopped people from seeing their doctors for the standard range of chronic health conditions, many of which require clinical laboratory tests for diagnosis and chronic disease...

Attention All Surgical Pathologists: Algorithms for Automated Primary Diagnosis of Digital Pathology Images Likely to Gain Regulatory Clearance in Near Future

Hello primary diagnosis of digital pathology images via artificial intelligence! Goodbye light microscopes! Digital pathology is poised to take a great leap forward. Within as few as 12 months, image analysis algorithms may gain regulatory clearance in the United States for use in primary diagnosis of whole-slide images (WSIs) for certain types of cancer. Such a development will be a true revolution in surgical pathology and would signal the beginning of the end of the light microscope era. A...

Essenlix Builds Mobile Technology Device That Performs CBC Tests Attached to a Smartphone

New advancements in mHealth, though encroaching on testing traditionally performed at clinical laboratories, offer opportunity to expand testing to remote locations Mobile technology continues to impact clinical laboratories and anatomic pathology groups and is a major driver in precision medicine, as Dark Daily has reported. Most of the mobile-test development which incorporates smartphones as the testing device, however, has been for chemistry and immunoassay types of lab tests. Now, a new...

New At-Home CBC Device Enables Complete Blood Testing for Cancer Treatments and Biological/Viral Monitoring

Chronic disease monitoring at home has become a boon to patients as well as hospitals that are finding cost savings in programs designed to monitor/treat patients at external locations Many clinical pathologists and medical laboratory scientists will be wary about the news that a California company wants to have cancer patients do their own CBCs at home, and  that a device to enable such testing is being prepped to go through the FDA clearance process. Home-based medicine care and chronic...

Medicare Clinical Laboratory Price Cuts and Cost-cutting Predicted to be 2018’s Two Biggest Trends for Medical Laboratories in the United States

To offset the loss of revenue from the price cuts to Medicare Part B clinical laboratory tests, labs will need to aggressively—but wisely—slash costs to balance their budgets Any day now, Medicare officials will announce the Medicare Part B Clinical Laboratory Fee Schedule (CLFS) for 2018. Both the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (OIG) have issued reports indicating that these fee cuts will total $400...
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