Mar 3, 2010 | Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology
Clinical Pathology Laboratory Customers of Millipore Not Likely to See Many Changes
It only took a few days for Millipore Corporation (NYSE: MIL) to find a buyer willing to outbid Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (NYSE: TMO). Millipore agreed to be acquired by Merck KGaA (FWB: MRK) of Darmstadt, Germany. Merck will pay about $7.2 billion for Millipore, which tops a reported bid of $6 billion made by Thermo Fisher last week.
Because many clinical pathology laboratories use Millipore’s water purification systems and other products, the pending acquisition of Millipore by Merck represents more consolidation among vendors serving the clinical laboratory industry. The acquisition is expected to close during the second half of 2010.
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Mar 1, 2010 | Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology
Clinical pathology laboratories may soon handle lab test orders entered by scribes on behalf of physicians
Along with the growing adoption of electronic medical record (EMR) systems comes robust demand for a new healthcare job: scribes! That is a bit ironic, since many advocates of EMRs believed that physicians would do the primary entry. In fact, the acronym CPOE (computerized physician order entry) was coined to describe this process.
The trend of hiring scribes to interpose between physicians and EMRs is an unanticipated consequence of wider adoption of EMR and EHR (electronic health record) systems. Wider utilization of scribes will directly affect clinical laboratories and pathology groups, because the scribe generally becomes the individual to place orders for clinical laboratory tests at the direction of physicians and track receipt of the lab test results into the EMR.
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Feb 19, 2010 | Digital Pathology, Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology
Mass General researchers use metabolomic imaging to accurately diagnose tumors
Pathology laboratories may soon find it possible to identify prostate cancer without a biopsy. A new technology under development at Massachusetts General Hospital demonstrates the potential to improve the accuracy of prostate cancer diagnosis. Some studies have demonstrated that nearly a quarter of initial biopsies of the prostate gland may generate false-negative results because the biopsy specimen failed to extract cells from existing cancerous tumors.
To improve the detection of prostate cancer, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) are investigating a new technique that may give doctors a way to locate even small tumors and to provide an accurate determination of a prostate tumor’s prognosis without using a biopsy.
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Feb 10, 2010 | Digital Pathology, Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology
Image is 142,603 by 105,000 pixels in size (or 41.8GB) and was scanned at a 1μm pixel resolution
Is it the largest pathology image ever produced? In an article, the journal BioOptics World reports that a breast tissue image may in fact be the largest digital pathology image ever produced. The image was produced by the TISSUEscope 4000 from Biomedical Photometrics Inc. (BPI) of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
The image is available online at http://www.confocal.com/ABOUT/Human_Breast-H&E.html. The announcement of the “largest pathology image ever produced” is a clever way for BPI to call attention to it scanning system. The company describes its product as a high-throughput panoramic scanning system for tissue slides and microarrays that images an area more than 100 times that of an ordinary microscope in a single scan.
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Jan 22, 2010 | Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology
Pathologists and clinical laboratories can expect a new type of federal oversight
One consequence following passage of the massive health bill now being considered by Congress is a significant expansion in the role of the Internal Revenue Service for certain healthcare activities. So writes Phil Galewitz and Christopher Weaver of Kaiser Health News about developments that are not auspicious for pathology and clinical laboratory testing.
They note that the job of enforcing the legislative mandate that requires every citizen of the United States to have health insurance (or pay a penalty tax) will fall to the IRS. The federal agency would look for this information on income tax returns. Americans would have to show proof of coverage on their income tax returns starting in either 2013 (House bill) or 2014 (Senate bill).
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