Digital Pathology Blog

Pathologists, particularly forensic pathologists and medical examiners, seem to provoke endless curiosity from Hollywood television writers. The pathology fascination can be seen in shows throughout the years like Quincy ME, Body of Proof, Rizzoli and Isles, and the CSI shows:

The question sounds cliché. Loosely defined, “team” is a group of people who work together, generally toward shared outcomes or goals. Like many, I grew up playing sports during childhood, we rode bikes without helmets, fended for ourselves, got ourselves to little league games and found out when we got into trouble our parents were generally on the side of the school or the coach. Those days are sadly over but the experiences taught me a couple of key life lessons:

When you boil it down to the bones, digital pathology needs to do one thing: make life easier for pathologists. Their role involves supporting physicians and patients across many institutions, geographies and hardware. They need to integrate all they do with their LISs. The end result has to be a better, faster, smarter, and easier to use workflow environment.

Major changes rarely evolve in a linear fashion. It usually comes down to a group of people pushing forward a new model while another group holds on with both hands to the status quo. Then a small group in the middle plays its role as the bridge to both sides.

Well, it’s not really new. For decades researchers have been linking a lack of sleep, disturbed sleep, or a “night shift” schedule to various health conditions. But as the studies mount, so does evidence that the intuitive link between sleep loss and metabolic disorders is actually becoming provable. A new report released this week in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology Journal pulls together multiple studies that point toward the detrimental effects on health that come with a sleep starved population.

This is a fascinating time to be part of the healthcare industry. There is a revolution happening in how providers are looking at patients, looking at costs, looking at technologies, looking at…everything. The major driver of the revolution is, of course, changes to reimbursement models driven by the Accountable Care Act (ACA). The death knell is sounding loudly across the U.S. for the Fee-for-Service (FFS) payment model that the government and other payers have used to reimburse healthcare providers for decades.

Billions of dollars in telemedicine grants are available every year from foundations and local, state, and federal agencies. Many healthcare providers miss out on beneficial funding opportunities because they don’t have the resources to track, develop, write, and manage grants. We reached out to Cathy Denison-Robert, Ph.D., founder of Denison Associates, Inc. Cathy and her team have been helping both large and small healthcare systems, educational institutions, and community organizations across the country for more than 20 years with their grants development process.

Are Electronic Health Records (EHR) vulnerable to hackers? Yes. But are hackers the main source of healthcare data breaches? According to a report just released by IT Security firm Redspin, theft is listed as causing 83% of all large HIPAA privacy and security breaches. Hacking accounted for 6% of breaches. 

Maybe not much, but it got us thinking. There has been some buzz lately about medical tourism funneling revenues away from US hospitals to overseas providers that offer popular procedures at lower cost.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that up to 750,000 US residents travel abroad to get care each year, while other sources put the number at closer to a million. The most common procedures sought by US residents in other countries include cosmetic surgery, dentistry, and heart surgery. The impetus for this mini-exodus is the hunt for cheaper medical procedures. 

Healthcare leaders in 2014 have a plethora of critical issues to tackle. A key challenge is how to cut costs to offset dwindling reimbursements without compromising patient care. There are an increasing number of hospitals taking a hard look at variations in care: using retrospective patient data to chart which protocols produce the best outcomes. These data-driven initiatives are producing an exciting intersection of quality and cost savings that improve patient outcomes and cut down on unnecessary prescriptions, tests, and procedures. 

A few weeks ago, the Journal of the American Pediatrics Association published a new study showing substantial diversity in how hospitals treat and manage tonsillitis. The study showed that in some facilities, as many as 13 percent of children suffered complications, whereas in others the rate was only 3 percent. Why the difference?