LabMind

Antibody therapy, which encompasses convalescent plasma, hyperimmune globulin, and monoclonal antibodies, is an intriguing and potentially important component of COVID-19 therapeutics. In this conversation with Dr. Ryan Metcalf, director of the University of Utah’s transfusion services, we discuss the current thinking around convalescent plasma therapy and why we need more formal clinical trials of therapies for emerging diseases.

COVID-19 presented ARUP’s Family Health Clinic with two major challenges: First, find ways to safely continue delivering the full range of primary care medical and wellness services. And second, set up a comprehensive infection control and contact tracing program for ARUP’s approximately 2,500 on-site workforce members. In this discussion, Dr. Kathryn Gibson, medical director for the clinic, describes how she collaborated with staff from the clinic, Wellness Center, Safety department, and others to succeed on both fronts.

Primary care in the United States is in crisis. Fee-for-service payment models cause clinics to maximize the volume of visits, leaving doctors feeling like hamsters running on a wheel, and patients feeling rushed and ignored. Medical and preventive health needs are shortchanged, resulting in poor health outcomes and enormous downstream costs. A decade ago, Dr. Peter Weir decided to solve this problem for ARUP’s employees and their dependents. He took ARUP’s employee health clinic and transformed it into a full-service medical home, untethered from fee-for-service reimbursement. Not only is the clinic enormously popular with ARUP’s workforce and their families, but it also reduces ARUP’s overall healthcare costs.

Supply shortages, from collection kits to reagents to personal protective equipment, have been a major bottleneck for COVID-19 testing. Join the ARUP supply chain management team and me as we take you behind the scenes of clinical laboratory supply sourcing. Michael Bevan and his team describe how purchasing processes and vendor-supplier relationships have dramatically changed in the era of COVID-19, and tell you why those processes and relationships may never be the same again.

A lot of misinformation has been propagated about the FDA’s role in regulating laboratory tests. Some have advocated for FDA regulation of all lab-developed tests as “medical devices,” which could be a death knell for many of these tests and put a stranglehold on the laboratory's ability to respond to certain patient care needs. In this conversation with Dr. David Grenache, chief scientific officer for TriCore Reference Laboratories, he discusses why laboratory-developed tests play an important clinical role, how they’re currently regulated, and how to best modernize those regulations.