How to make a hospital-based wound center financially viable: the Georgetown University Hospital model.

As the medical need and expenditure for chronic wound care have increased markedly over the past decade, wound centers have grown exponentially throughout the country. They can be community-based or hospital-based, and in either case, can be run by the facility or by a national chain. The wound center's viability is dependent on generated revenue, and its clinical effectiveness is based on a multidisciplinary approach to wound care.

Molecular diagnostics resources on the Internet.

Busy diagnosticians need to know what is useful, and what is dross, when dealing with the internet. From the comprehensive array of resources that characterizes the offerings available via the world wide web and email correspondence, in particular, this chapter seeks to identify the most useful tools for the diagnostics laboratory. With rapid communications and fast internet consultations only a few keystrokes away, there really is no point in wasting time on fruitless searches when professionals are so accessible.

The first monoclonal antibody-based, matrix-resistant immunoassay for the carbamate herbicide asulam, in water.

To date, no ligand binding assay has been described for the carbamate herbicide asulam, although a variety of physical methods, dependent on pre-concentration of water samples, have been documented for its assessment. However, asulam is increasingly used in sensitive agricultural areas, and statutory regulations concerning its monitoring will undoubtedly become more stringent. Antibodies are optimal partners in ligand binding assays, but it is commonly understood by immunological researchers that where no antibody reactive with a particular antigen has yet been described, the immunogenicity of the antigen may be particularly restricted.

Enhanced specificity for small molecules in a convenient format which removes a limitation of competitive immunoassay.

Anti-complex immunoassay systems for small molecules permit the exquisite specificity achievable with monoclonal antibodies to be expressed to an extent which is not possible with competitive format immunoassay. While our previously reported anti-complex system is superior to competitive systems in terms of sensitivity, precision and specificity we have found that this specificity may be enhanced dramatically by simply interposing a wash step between the addition of sample and that of the labelled anti-complex antibody. When such a wash step was attempted with the competitive format system, after addition of sample but before addition of the labelled component, assay performance was degraded to the extent of making it unusable.