Humana’s New Oncology Value-based Care Program Includes Quality and Cost Measurements of Provider Performance, Clinical Laboratories, and Pathology Groups

“Pathologists and medical laboratories may have to demonstrate efficiency and effectiveness to stay in the insurer’s networks and get paid for their services In recent years, Medicare officials have regularly introduced new care models that include quality metrics for providers involved in a patient’s treatment. Now comes news that a national health insurer is launching an innovative cancer-care model that includes quality metrics for medical laboratories and anatomic pathology groups...

Researchers at Several Top Universities Unveil CRISPR-Based Diagnostics That Show Great Promise for Clinical Laboratories

Three innovative technologies utilizing CRISPR-Cas13, Cas12a, and Cas9 demonstrate how CRISPR might be used for more than gene editing, while highlighting potential to develop new diagnostics for both the medical laboratory and point-of-care (POC) testing markets CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is in the news again! The remarkable genetic-editing technology is at the core of several important developments in clinical laboratory and anatomic pathology...

Collaborative Global Study Casts New Light on Breast Cancer’s Genetic Roots; Will Soon Provide Anatomic Pathologists and Clinical Laboratories with New Tools to Diagnose and Treat Cancer

In the same way that BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations helped pathologists identify women with increased breast cancer risks in the late 1990s, this new study isolates an additional 72 mutations medical laboratories may soon use to diagnose breast cancer and assess risk factors For 20 years genetic scientists, anatomic pathologists, and medical laboratories have employed the BRCA1/BRCA2 genes to identify women at higher risk for breast cancer. And, because pathologists receive a high number of breast...

Netherlands University Researchers Question Validity of More Than 30,000 Published Scientific Studies; Findings Have Implications for Medical Laboratories

Radboud University researchers fear oncology, molecular biology, pharmacology, and other cell-centric medical research efforts are at risk due to verification that at least 30,000 studies published in 33,000 scientific journals included data derived from misidentified or contaminated cell lines Many research findings that underpin the science behind various diagnostic technologies used regularly by clinical laboratories and anatomic pathology groups may not be valid. This is because a large...

Targeted Cancer Therapies Bring New Precision Medicine Tools to Anatomic Pathologists and Clinical Laboratories

FDA is streamlining how new diagnostic tests are approved; encourages IVD companies to focus on ‘qualifying biomarkers’ in development of new cancer drugs It is good news for the anatomic pathology profession that new insights into the human immune system are triggering not only a wave of new therapeutic drugs, but also the need for companion diagnostic tests that help physicians decide when it is appropriate to prescribe immunotherapy drugs. Rapid advances in precision medicine, and the...
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