Clinical Lab Chat – Details, episodes & analysis

In this edition of Clinical Lab Chat, CLP’s Director of Business Intelligence, Chris Wolski, interviews Alessio Travaglia, PhD, PMP, director, Translational Science, Neuroscience, at the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH).

The wide-ranging interview tackles all aspects of Alzheimer’s testing and treatment, including:

• Why traditional methods of Alzheimer’s testing are expensive, invasive, and limit access.
• The benefits of blood-based biomarkers for Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
• How better diagnostics will benefit patients.
• Why we’re on the cusp of a new golden age of neurology
• How more biomarkers fuel not only better diagnostics but better treatments.

In this wide-ranging episode of Clinical Lab Chat, CLP’s director of business intelligence, Chris Wolski, discusses the hows and whys of keeping kids engaged in science with Natalie Kuldell, executive director of BioBuilder (biobuilder.org), a 501c3 non-profit designed to inspire kids and help teachers and professionals keep students interested in science in school and beyond. Kuldell, who was named as a STEM trailblazer in 2020, is also a member of the MIT faculty. 

Among the topics discussed in this episode:

• How to foster and sustain a love of science throughout a kid’s educational journey
• How important parents, teachers, and professionals are to sustaining scientific interest
• How laboratorians can directly influence students to pursue a laboratory or allied career
• The benefits to society as a whole having an scientifically knowledgeable citizenry

In this episode of Clinical Lab Chat, CLP’s Director of Business Intelligence, Chris Wolski, interviews Jessica Murphy, MLS(ASCP)CM, senior technical laboratory educator for Thermo Fisher Scientific. Among the topics they tackled:

• Why there has been an increased prevalence of food allergies among the U.S. population in the past few decades.
• How home testing has helped to revolutionize allergy identification—and its potential clinical pitfalls.
• Why primary care physicians are on the allergy testing frontlines.
• How more precise allergy testing will help clinicians and patients manage these conditions.
• Why clinical labs are still critically important for allergy testing.
• What we can expect from allergy testing in the next 5 to 10 years.

In this episode of Clinical Lab Chat, Chris Wolski, CLP’s director of Business Intelligence, David West, CEO of Proscia, and Lou Welebob, vice president and general manager of pathology at Agilent, take a deep dive into the big challenges facing clinical labs today, including workforce shortages, scaling lab operations, and reimbursement, along with some of their solutions, including increased automation, agnostic platforms, and more coherent reimbursement coordination with regulatory agencies.

In the latest episode of Clinical Lab Chat, CLP’s director of business intelligence, Chris Wolski, has a wide-ranging discussion with Jeff Andrews, MD, FRCSC, vice president of Medical Affairs for BD, about BD’s recent STI health survey and what the findings mean for women’s health and their access to care. They also discuss the poor state of medical health education in the U.S., solutions that can help healthcare providers more efficiently test women for sexually transmitted infections, and how laboratorians can help improve testing rates.

In this episode of Clinical Lab Chat, Chris Wolski and his guest, medical lead at Hurdle, Alex Owens, MD, MPH, discuss the reasons for the rise of at-home testing during COVID, how at-home test improves healthcare access, and the win-win-win it brings to clinical laboratories.

In this episode of Clinical Lab Chat, Chris Wolski meets the Texas A&M team behind what could be an effective, highly sensitive test for Lyme disease. Artem Rogovskky, PhD, ACVM, and Dmitry Kurouski, PhD, outline why Lyme disease is a diagnostic challenge and their work on developing a Lyme disease test using Raman spectroscopy.

During the latest installment of Clinical Lab Chat, CLP Director of Business Intelligence Chris Wolski and Prasanth Perugupalli, chief product officer for Pramana, tackle why there have been delays in pathology labs adopting digital solutions, the business case for digital pathology, how it can change laboratory workflows, and what the future holds for digital pathology.

There are a number of challenges facing clinical laboratories today. Perhaps, the biggest is the ongoing laboratorian shortage. In this episode of Clinical Lab Chat, CLP’s Director of Business Intelligence Chris Wolski interviews Jim Payne, Medical Lab Assisting & Phlebotomy instructor at WEMOCO, Rochester, NY, about the successful high school program he has developed that prepares students for a career in the lab—with many of his students leaving the classroom for a lab bench the day after graduation. Has Jim found one of the keys to solve the laboratorian shortage? Listen and find out.

In this special edition of Clinical Lab Chat, sponsored by Sysmex America, Inc., CLP’s Director of Business Intelligence, Chris Wolski, does a deep dive into lab QA & QC best practices with Daniel Johnson, assistant director of marketing for Informatics & Service at Sysmex America, Inc. Among the topics they discuss are how to make QA and QC into a preventative and predictive programs instead of reactive tasks, the importance of data with QA and QC workflows, and the one thing Dan would change about the way labs handle QA and QC right now if he could just snap his fingers.