It is that time of year when we celebrate National  Medical Laboratory Professionals Week (NMLPW).  This is a week when the various, often competing, laboratory organizations join forces  to honor the more than 300,000 medical laboratory professionals around the country who perform and interpret more than 10 ...

Since the ASCP took over the popular and progressive NCA in 2009, I have periodically received emails from medical lab professionals not happy with the merger for various reasons.  Prompted by this overwhelming response, I have previously blogged about this subject. I have also addressed the mixed response to the move. Recently I have ...

Today, December 1, is World AIDS Day. This is the 25th annual observance of the day originally organized under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO) to raise the awareness of HIV/AIDS and garner support for research, understanding, education and allocation of resources. We have come a long way in our understanding, treatment and ...

I recently learned that the merger talks between two laboratory organizations ASCLS and CLMA have broken down.  Now it might surprise you that as a long time, avid advocate of professional unification,  I was not really devastated by this news. Here's some background.  ASCLS, an organization  to which I have belonged ...

CMS recently dropped outpatient quality measure OP-16, which required reporting cardiac troponin results within 60 minutes of arrival with chest pain, citing a recall of point of care (POC) testing devices from one manufacturer. Oh, happy day. When I circulated the CMS memo a nurse said with relief, “Thank God we don’t have to use POC ...

I am in the process of packing to attend the ASCLS Annual Meeting 2012 in Los Angeles, Tuesday through Saturday, July 17 to 21. I am exciting because I will be an attendee as well as a presenter. As in recent years, ASCLS is joining with AACC to  mount the world's largest clinical laboratory meeting and exposition.  These meetings are ...

A surgeon storms into the manager’s office and screams at the top of his lungs with patients within earshot. An OB gets in the face of a tech and tells her she almost killed a patient right in a patient waiting area. A pediatrician complains to a patient he doesn’t trust the laboratory -- as the lab tech is collecting a heel stick sample. These ...

The US Preventive Services Task Force is recommending that healthy men should not be routinely screened with the PSA test. There has been a buzz that this decision was in the offing for several years now, so the final ruling is not a surprise to  many. The logic of course is that the test has a high degree of nonspecificity and is ...

The other day a staff person said, “I’ll bet the nurses don’t like coming to the lab. This is our turf, and it’s us against them when that happens.” Most nurses love coming the lab if they are greeted with warm smiles and pleasantries. It’s ironic that we laboratory people will stay inside our “black box” and complain when our work isn’t ...

This week, April 22-28, we celebrate National Medical Laboratory Professionals' Week (NMLPW). This celebartion was started in 1975 as National Medical Laboratory Week (without the word ''professionals'') by American Society for Medical Technology (ASMT), now called the American Society for Clinical Laboratory Science (ASCLS). Now in its 36th ...