LabMind

Crises such as COVID-19 have a way of compressing a lifetime of leadership preparation into a single intense performance. Dr. Julio Delgado has worked as a primary care physician, immunology researcher, laboratory director, and chief medical officer of ARUP Laboratories. In this discussion he explains how his philosophy of leadership, which is based on valuing and connecting with individuals, has been tested in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Patients with autoimmune disease have faced some distinct challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. These challenges include tough decisions about whether to stop their immunosuppressant therapy and difficulties refilling their regular prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine. Dr. Tracy Frech, director of the Systemic Sclerosis clinic at the University of Utah, describes how she's supporting her patients during this difficult time. She also describes her research collaboration with clinical laboratorians and other academic colleagues to find answers to key questions that are important for this patient population.

How much do we really know about the sensitivity of COVID-19 molecular tests? And how much sensitivity can be safely sacrificed in favor of assay speed or the ease of collecting a particular specimen type? David Hillyard has decades of experience developing and studying molecular tests for viruses, including HIV, hepatitis B, and hepatitis C. His lab was one of the first in the U.S. to develop and validate a high-throughput assay for SARS-CoV-2. In our conversation he explains the key factors that impact the accuracy of these tests, what we know so far, and what we still have to learn.

Most healthcare professionals are frustrated by the lagging progress of health IT. In an era when Google and Facebook seem to know every detail of our lives, why can’t health IT do a better job of predicting the information needs of patients and clinicians? Or even modify their data displays based on clinical context? One reason is the nonstandardized nature of most healthcare data. Pam Banning has spent her career making health data more usable through standardized terminologies such as LOINC and SNOMED. In this conversation she describes how far we’ve come using semantic interoperability over the past 25 years, and why we still have a very long way to go.

Thrombosis has turned out to be one of the major subplots of the COVID-19 clinical story. In this conversation, two experts in hemostasis and thrombosis explain how academic physicians and scientists have been studying the coagulation defects seen in patients with COVID-19 in order to more effectively monitor patients and prevent complications.