Data warehouse strategies and the modern anatomic pathology laboratory: Quality management, patient safety, and pathology productivity issues and opportunities.

Application of lean process management strategies to process improvement in clinical and anatomic pathology laboratories afford opportunities to enhance workflow process to lower costs and simultaneously to improve patient safety. Bar-codes are now employed in most modern anatomic pathology laboratories to track specimens from the clinicians' office or the operating room all through the continuum of service to specimen disposal. In order to enhance patient safety and workload optimization strategies, novel computer hardware and software assets are being developed to enable monitoring, analysis, and improvement of specimen workflow and diagnostic accuracy.

The clinical performance of Invader technology and SurePath when detecting the presence of high-risk HPV cervical infection.

Background: Testing for high-risk genotypes of the human papillomavirus (HR HPV) has been fully integrated into the management algorithms for the prevention of cervical cancer. The literature is limited with regard to the evaluation of the clinical performance of laboratory-developed tests (LDT) utilizing Invader V2.0 assay (ThirdWave/Hologic, Madison, WI, USA) for the detection of HR HPV.

A comparison of two methods to determine the presence of high-risk HPV cervical infections.

Clinical tests for human papillomavirus (HPV) DNA require clinical validation before being offered for use by laboratories. To determine the clinical viability of a laboratory-developed test using the Invader HPV reagents (Third Wave Technologies, Madison, WI), a retrospective study was designed using 213 patient cervical cytologic samples. The results of the Invader assay were directly compared with the results obtained using the Hybrid Capture 2 High-Risk HPV assay (Digene, Gaithersburg, MD).