News, Analysis, Trends, Management Innovations for
Clinical Laboratories and Pathology Groups

Hosted by Robert Michel

News, Analysis, Trends, Management Innovations for
Clinical Laboratories and Pathology Groups

Hosted by Robert Michel
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New Super-Sensitive Clinical Lab Test Technology Combines ELISA and Nanotechnology for Simpler, Cheaper and Earlier Detection of Disease

Pathologists and clinical laboratory managers can expect to see new technology translated to a wide variety of diagnostic tests

Researchers claim a new diagnostic technology for detecting the HIV virus is 10 times more sensitive than traditional techniques. More remarkable is the fact that this new technology enables analyte detection at very low concentrations with the naked eye!

Pathologists and clinical laboratory managers won’t see this technology enter clinical use for some time. That is because the developers hope to deploy the accurate, fast, and very cheap HIV medical laboratory tests in Africa first. Once validated in actual clinical use, this radically innovative technology could be adapted for use in a wide variety of clinical laboratory tests.

Scientists at the London Centre for Nanotechnology at Imperial College London (ICL) developed the prototype biosensing mechanism, according to a press release published by EurekAlert!. They claim that the qualitative visual sensor technology is 10 times more sensitive than the current gold standard methods for measuring biomarkers. (more…)

Business Intelligence Comes to The Clinical Laboratory Industry – Finally!

Business Intelligence software now allows for real-time data capture, analysis and evaluation of medical laboratory operations

For clinical laboratories and anatomic pathology groups across the nation, the latest use of middleware is for business intelligence. This is a brand-new trend, as only first-mover and early adopter medical laboratories have acquired and currently use some type of middleware solution that delivers business intelligence.

One-by-one, laboratory informatics companies are crafting middleware products specifically designed to deliver business intelligence to their customers and clients. Business Intelligence (BI) is a computer-based approach to collecting and analyzing business data. A flurry of activity in the laboratory informatics sector reinforces the importance of health IT and healthcare analytics in an increasingly competitive medical laboratory testing market. (more…)

Clinical Pathology Laboratories Beef Up Courier and Logistics Services to Deliver More Value to Client Physicians

Medical laboratories gain competitive advantage by using GPS and real-time vehicle tracking to improve performance of their couriers

Like everything else in laboratory medicine, even such once-simple operational areas as logistics and courier services are becoming complicated—and more expensive. The reasons are familiar to all clinical laboratory managers and pathologists.

For example, sophisticated new diagnostic technologies require that specimens be transported with greater care to ensure that they arrive at the medical laboratory with full integrity.

Tougher patient privacy laws make it essential that couriers understand how to protect the confidential information that is often printed on the clinical laboratory test requisition forms that are placed in the plastic bags with the lab samples.
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GE Healthcare Pays $587 Million to Purchase Clarient, the Specialty Pathology and Cancer Testing Firm

GE’s Acquisition Considered A Sign Of More Deals To Come In The Clinical Laboratory Industry

Here’s more confirmation that anatomic pathology continues to be a big target on the radar screen of big healthcare corporations and Wall Street investors. Today, GE Healthcare, a unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE), disclosed it will pay $587 million to acquire Clarient, Inc. (NASDAQ: CLRT), the medical testing laboratory.

For pathologists and clinical laboratory managers, this is further confirmation that GE—one of the world’s major players in molecular imagin and radiology—intends to combine molecular diagnostic technologies used in anatomic pathology with its molecular imaging technologies used in radiology. In the press release about the acquisition, GE wrote that the addition of Clairent would help it create “new integrated tools for the diagnosis and characterization of cancer.”

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At University of Kansas, Radiologist and Pathologist Improve Diagnostic Concordance

Use of digital pathology imaging allows both specialists to jointly review cases

In a pioneering effort at The University of Kansas, a radiologist and a pathologist are working side by side to review each other’s primary images and issue an integrated diagnostic report for breast cancer patients. The big surprise from this groundbreaking collaboration is a measurable improvement in diagnostic accuracy, leading to improved patient outcomes.

By reaching across the traditional silos that separate the daily practice of radiology from the daily practice of pathology, these two specialists have demonstrated that the concept of diagnostic integration of in vivo (imaging) and in vitro (pathology) diagnostics can demonstrably improve patient care. In part, this happens because of improved concordance in the reports issued by the radiologist and the pathologist.
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