Tag Archives: Specimen collection/labeling/processing/rejection

February 2022—It was Isaac Asimov who surmised: “The most exciting phrase to hear in science is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny . . .’” And it was coagulation processing in the clinical laboratory that, in a small way, illustrated Asimov’s axiom for Dorothy Adcock, MD, former chief medical officer, Labcorp Diagnostics.

August 2019—A practical guide that can help labs standardize the handling of a patient’s surgical specimen from harvest to diagnosis is available but too little known, and one of its authors aims to change its hidden treasure status. The 52-page “Practical Guide to Specimen Hand-ling in Surgical Pathology” is on the CAP/NSH Histotechnology Committee page on the CAP website. “Our main objective was to standardize specimen collection handling. Nothing had ever been done like it before,” says Elizabeth Sheppard, MBA, HT(ASCP), past president of the National Society for Histotechnology and head of global market access at Roche Tissue Diagnostics, Tucson, Ariz. She and M. Elizabeth H. Hammond, MD, first chair of the CAP Center Guideline Committee, submitted the topic for an evidence-based guideline; however, it was determined to be better suited as a practical guide for labs to be developed by the CAP/NSH Histotechnology Committee.

February 2017—A laboratory’s proposal to provide free labeling services to some of its dialysis center clients poses more than a minimal risk of fraud and abuse, according to an advisory opinion from the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

October 2013—Culturing organisms is not always easy. Some microbes are fastidious. Others are below the limits of detection. And still others are just difficult to culture, for no discernible reason.

September 2013—A handful, a fraction of a percent, a tiny portion. In most institutions, that’s about how many tests are cancelled after they’ve been ordered and a specimen has been sent to the laboratory. But even that small number can have significant quality implications. The authors of the Q-Probes study, ”Reasons for Test Cancellation,” looked at more than a million specimen accessions at several dozen institutions, to get a fix on why tests are being cancelled and to gain insight into how laboratories can bring that number down. As the study makes clear, there is definitely room for improvement.