ASCP 2025 Advocacy Sessions Empower Members to Champion Pathology and Laboratory Medicine

ASCP’s advocacy efforts on behalf of the Society’s members will be prominently featured at the ASCP 2025 Annual Meeting, Nov. 17-20, in Atlanta, GA. The Annual Meeting is the perfect time to learn how ASCP represents your needs. Make it a point to attend one or more sessions that focus on the Society’s advocacy efforts on policy issues that affect your practice. These sessions will equip participants with the knowledge and tools to advocate for their profession, while also highlighting the laboratory's impact on patient care. Below are a few of the advocacy-related sessions and presentations. 

Laboratory Developed Tests: Future Directions and Lessons Learned 

Nov. 19, 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. EST 

Presenters: Jon Genzen, MD, PhD, MBA, FASCP, and Michelle Campbell, MS, MLS(ASCP)^CMMB^CMSC^CM  

As the regulatory landscape surrounding laboratory-developed tests (LDTs) continues to evolve, this session provides a timely reflection on where we have been, lessons learned, and how to prepare for what comes next. There will be a brief overview of recent events involving LDT oversight, highlighting key milestones that have shaped the current environment. The focus will center on real-world experiences from the laboratory medicine and pathology community, and explore lessons learned across the areas of regulatory readiness and interpretation of regulation, validation, and verification processes including best practices for documentation, post-launch monitoring of LDTs, cross-functional collaboration within and external to our own institutions, strategic risk management, and increasing visibility of LDT performance and benefits.  

The session will look ahead to what the future may entail for potential LDT oversight, such as updates to the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) and new legislative efforts. The goal is to better answer the question: “How can we better position our laboratories for the next wave of change?”  

Public Policy Update 

November 18, 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. EST 

The 2024 elections brought about a sea change in politics at the federal level, with Republicans winning the While House and both chambers of Congress. Join ASCP staff and policy experts for a discussion of federal policy regarding Medicare coverage and payment for pathology and clinical laboratory services. In addition, a panel of experts will update attendees on the recent decision in the lawsuit that successfully challenged the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s authority to regulate laboratory developed tests and how Congress may change the landscape for these laboratory services. Lastly, learn about ASCP’s efforts to reduce the regulatory burden on the practice of pathology and laboratory medicine. 

Internship Academy: Building Internships Today to Develop the Laboratory Workforce for Tomorrow 

Nov. 3, 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. EST 

Presenter: John A. Baci MBA, C-PM  

This “Path to Atlanta,” prerecorded session will focus on the new ASCP Internship Academy and show how you can develop your own program and create a supply of qualified entry level talent for your staff. The Internship Academy is designed to expand young people’s awareness about careers in the clinical laboratory. It enhances the Society’s already significant offerings to cultivate a new generation of laboratory professionals.  

The Internship Academy is directed toward high school juniors and seniors, students in STEM programs, as well as college students. The inspiration for the academy came, in part, from the career internship program Mr. Baci established in 2010 at Boston Children’s Hospital. Mr. Baci, who played a key role in developing the ASCP Internship Academy, is the senior director of the Pathology Foundation Financial Operations and Strategic Planning and chief operating officer of Children’s Hospital Pathology Foundation, Inc., part of Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), in Boston, MA.  

Pathology Workforce Poster Presentation 

Nov. 18, 12 to 12:45 p.m. EST 

Presenter: Elena Tsai, BS  

The field of pathology is undergoing both rapid change and growing strain. Advances in digital tools, including AI, are enabling pathologists to deliver diagnoses with unprecedented precision and efficiency. However, there remain regulatory, logistical, and ethical challenges to fully integrate these new technologies into everyday practice. At the same time, the profession is grappling with a significant shortage of pathologists. This supply deficit is driven by factors ranging from an aging workforce to limited visibility, and demands multi-faceted solutions     

These are some of the topics that will be addressed in this presentation, which showcases research ASCP has compiled on the pathology workforce in the United States. The research examined demographic data; supply and demand of pathologists (noting about 40 percent of practicing pathologists in the U.S. hail from other countries); and how emerging technologies are affecting the profession.    

These insights can be used to help promote visibility of the profession, strengthen recruitment for medical schools, and equip current pathologists and academics with evidence to advocate for the workforce in institutional and policy discussions.  

Lab Leaders in Action: Honoring ASCP's 2025 Laboratory Stewardship Champions 

Nov. 18, 12:15 p.m. to 1:15 p.m. EST 

ASCP’s Laboratory Stewardship Champions program (formerly Choosing Wisely Champions) celebrates influential initiatives in pathology and laboratory medicine led by pathologists, laboratory professionals, clinicians, and interdisciplinary teams. These efforts reflect a deep commitment to ASCP’s Effective Test Utilization recommendations, and exemplify best practices that are patient-centered, innovative, and transformative. This session will honor the 2025 Laboratory Stewardship Champions and highlight their inspirational work. Attendees will gain insight into how these leaders are driving meaningful change in healthcare through smarter testing and collaborative stewardship.  

New Benchmarking Platform to Enhance Laboratory Performance  
Performance and Diagnostics Insights (PDI), an innovative platform launched by ASCP, is designed to revolutionize how healthcare organizations capture clinical and anatomic pathology laboratory data to analyze and improve performance.   

PDI empowers laboratories and health systems with advanced benchmarking and quality performance insights, enabling them to measure, compare, and optimize laboratory operations, test utilization, and test quality. By providing access to aggregated and comparative analytics, PDI equips pathologists, laboratory professionals, and healthcare leaders with the actionable intelligence needed to improve clinical decision-making and ensure excellence in patient care. 

“Labs currently have a very tedious, manual process to analyze this data,” says Sachin Gupta, PhD, MBA, MT(ASCPⁱ)MB, Lean SSBB, scientific director of the ASCP Center for Quality and Patient Safety. “Moreover, benchmarking is not even available to them. Hence, labs are struggling with real-time data and getting valuable insights from their data. PDI is a tool that will benefit our members by supporting them in quality improvement.”  

PDI will enable labs to benchmark and compare their performance to other institutions. It will help demonstrate the value of the laboratory or its “downstream effect” on how it adds value to patient care by providing results in a timely manner and demonstrate to C-suite executives that the lab is a valuable asset to the institution. Finally, it will help improve patient care and patient safety.  

Check out PDI in the Exhibit Hall at the ASCP Annual Meeting! Additionally, Dr. Gupta has recorded a presentation for Path to Atlanta Pre-Recorded Session on the PDI program for the ASCP 2025 Annual Meeting which is available to those registered for the conference.  

Learn more about the PDI by clicking here.