Hot Topics
ACOs, the Affordable Care Act and Patient-centered Care
A panel of nationally-renowned leaders in pathology will address the ways in which pathologists can take a leadership role in the changing landscape of health care. The session will be moderated by James Crawford, MD, PhD, FASCP, Senior Vice President of Laboratory Medicine at North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System in Manhasset, N.Y.
Appropriate Test Utilization
ASCP joined the Choosing Wisely campaign started by ABIM. The focus of the campaign is cutting costs for laboratories and patients through appropriate test utilization. Lee Hilborne, MD, MPH, FASCP, DLM(ASCP)CM will moderate this discussion with expert panelists.
Gene Patents
Chris Hansen, the lead American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer who successfully fought to ensure that human genes could not be patented, will discuss the recent Supreme Court ruling and the far-reaching implications for pathology, laboratory medicine, and patient care.
Genomics
The fastest-growing, most important, and most challenging area in diagnostic pathology is molecular pathology, its enormous implications, and its interface with morphologic pathology. This critical and evolving area and its enormous implications are effectively discussed in a focused, tightly-constructed, targeted compendium, using examples from daily practice, that will allow both general pathologists and medical technologists to understand and participate in this evolving and crucial discipline in his or her practice.
Digital Imaging, Automation and Robotics
Advances in digital pathology imaging and related technologies are impacting the practice of pathology and cytopathology resulting in improvements in pathology education, consultation, quality assurance, proficiency assessment, image analysis, research, and remote intraoperative consultation and rapid on-site evaluation (ROSE) of FNA specimens.
Global Health Initiatives
Several sessions will highlight strategies for building a sustainable global workforce; initiatives to improve the quality of laboratory medicine in East Africa; strategies to prevent cervical cancer, a major killer of women worldwide; and a retrospective of ASCP’s 9-year involvement in the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) initiative to build laboratory capacity in resource limited countries.
Pathology Informatics, “Big Data” initiatives, and their Impact on Personalized medicine
As changes in health care evolve, clinical informatics is at the heart of multidisciplinary medical teams and their ability to work together. This session will examine the dramatic advances in pathology informatics and the important role the field will play in improving the delivery of health care.
CPT Codes
CPT codes play a vital role in ensuring pathologists are reimbursed for their medical laboratory services for Medicare and Medicaid patients and are among the hot topics in the current national dialogue about healthcare reform.