LabMind

For her doctoral dissertation, Dr. Susan Edralin dove into the issue of communicating the value contribution of pathology and laboratory medicine to healthcare administrators. What she found in her conversations surprised her. In this interview, she lists some of the misunderstandings regarding laboratory value and describes how lab directors can raise the status of their laboratory operations and expert staff.

To access this episode on the ARUP website: https://arup.utah.edu/education/podcasts/labmindEp66.php 

You know what a patent is, but do you know what’s patentable in the field of laboratory diagnostics? Or how patent law has changed over the years? In this interview, Dr. Bert Ley, a registered patent agent with decades of experience in the clinical laboratory industry, unpacks some of the mysteries of the U.S. patent system and how it ultimately benefits society.

Laboratory testing can either lead to the correct diagnosis or take a clinician down a blind alley, depending on how carefully the tests are selected and performed. In this interview, a practicing neurologist (Dr. Tammy Smith) and a clinical laboratory immunologist (Dr. Lisa Peterson) explain some of the complexities of laboratory diagnosis of autoimmune neurologic disease, and how to ensure good diagnostic outcomes.

Many hospitals test newborn babies for exposure to drugs of abuse. Although this sounds fairly straightforward, in practice it has been difficult to standardize testing protocols, let alone keep up with substance use trends. Compared with other areas of laboratory medicine, drug testing is also associated with unique social and legal ramifications, specimen collection processes, and result reporting decisions. In this interview, Dr. Gwen McMillin describes current academic perspectives on these issues, and where she sees the field heading.

Within our current healthcare institutions, patients’ voices are often drowned out by the voices of providers, scientists, and industry. Andrea Downing’s life work is to fix this. As a BRCA1 cancer previvor and a patients’ rights activist, she was a spokesperson for one of the plaintiffs in the U.S. Supreme Court case that ultimately overturned gene patenting. Years later, while moderating an online patient support group, she discovered a major privacy vulnerability in Facebook, which led her into cybersecurity research. In this interview, she chronicles her journey and lays out her vision for patients as cocreators within medicine and medical science.

To most laboratorians, quality control is all about rules, metrics, and thresholds. To Dr. Fred Strathmann, on the other hand, it’s about gaining understanding of the underlying processes. In this interview, he shares examples of ways to think more deeply about measurements in order to drive organizational improvement.