The goal for personalized medicine has been drummed into my head using the following mantra: selecting the right drug for the right patient at the right time. However, I have tended to avoid the use of the term personalized medicine, favoring the term targeted therapy. However and not unexpectedly, we have come to another turn in the road regarding the meaning of personalized medicine/targeted therapy medicine due to new scientific discoveries. My goal for this note is to discuss what I... Read Full Story

When browsing the July issue of Laboratory Economics, I came across the following table: What are the biggest challenges pathology groups will face over the next 5 years?  I thought that such a list would be a good starting point for generating an expanded list of the major strategic challenges facing hospital-based pathology and lab medicine groups in the near-term. To launch this discussion, I now provide this table for your review. It's clear to me that nearly all of the items in this... Read Full Story

I am pleased to announce that Dr.Jason Hwang has agreed to deliver a lecture at the next Lab InfoTech Summit that will take place in Las Vegas on March 16-18, 2009. He is a co-author with Clayton Christensen of a book (The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care) that discuses disruptive innovation as it relates to the healthcare industry entitled. You are going to have to wait for it to be published -- it won't be available until October 23, 2008. However, we will be... Read Full Story

In a previous note, I reported Fred Sanfilippo's departure from Ohio State (see: Fred Sanfilippo, Noted Pathologist, Moves to Emory). Joel Saltz, a leader in pathology informatics, is now making a similar move to Atlanta (see: Bioinformatics Pioneer Will Lead New Initiatives at Emory University). He currently serves as professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University, Davis Endowed... Read Full Story

Some of my recent notes have focused on the corporate culture of Epic Systems (see: Epic Systems and Its Corporate Culture; More on the Epic Culture: Is This a Cult or a Company?). This activity has brought to my attention a political tempest that has been brewing around Epic in its own back yard in Wisconsin (see: Epic Systems Should be WMC's Biggest Fan). Epic recently announced that it will no longer do business with companies associated with Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce (WMC), a... Read Full Story

A recent post (see: Comparison of "Traditional" Lab Testing with Direct Access Testing) marked an effort on my part to begin to establish a naming convention for all clinical lab testing. Here's a quote from the note:The key difference between traditional lab testing (TLT) and direct-access-testing (DAT) is that physicians order the former and they are always performed by someone other than the patient/consumer. Patients/consumers order and frequently pay out-of-pocket for the latter and they... Read Full Story

In my search for new ideas for blog posts, I frequently turn to the list of search terms that visitors to Lab Soft News have entered into their search engines to find the blog. If I click on any of these search terms, SiteMeter, the service that I use to monitor my blog usage, displays the same search engine retrieval page (SERP) that was shown to the visitor. One such visitor recently entered the search term "cardiac ultrasound laboratory project budget costs" into the beta version of a... Read Full Story

I was contacted by Eric Olson of Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics and asked to alert the readers of Lab Soft News to the upcoming kickoff meeting of the IVD Industry Connectivity Consortium (IICC). It will be held on Monday, July 28th, 7:00 to 10:00 a.m., at the Renaissance Washington Hotel, Meeting Room 1. All vendors of IVD instruments and lab software systems, including LISs, are are cordially invited. Eric says that the IICC is particularly interested in the participation of LIS vendors... Read Full Story

In the course of researching yesterday's note about a direct-access-testing (DAT) franchise (see: DAT Franchise in Fort Lauderdale Focuses on "Sex and Drugs"), I came across an article on the topic from Washington G-2 Reports that provided an estimate of the total U. S. lab testing market versus the direct-to-consumer (DTC) laboratory testing market (see: Direct-to-Consumer Testing and Its Impact on the Lab Market). Such estimates are hard to find from reputable sources. My problem with the... Read Full Story

A recent article about a Florida direct access testing (DAT) franchise operation provides more details than are generally available about this type of business but casts the field in a somewhat unsavory light (see: Store does walk-in lab tests). I have covered direct access testing in detail in many previous notes. Below is an excerpt from this article with boldface emphasis mine: Tom Noonan and son Travis stand outside their Any Lab Test Now store...in Fort Lauderdale... Read Full Story