With the dismissal of residents from training programs having led to well-known tragedies, the most recent in pathology just a year ago, attention is being paid to the importance of ensuring residents’ well-being and properly handling remediation, probation, and dismissal.

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education has strengthened its requirements for what kind of information residency programs must share about residents’ performance. The ACGME’s common program requirements, last revised in June 2013, say “a program director must provide timely verification of residency education and summative performance evaluations for residents who may leave the program prior to completion.”

My latest in CAP TODAY’s Put it On the Board section. Read the whole shebang.

A trillion base pairs of sequence here, a trillion there. Pretty soon, you’re talking about a lot of information—and it all needs to be managed. That’s the dilemma facing Mayo Clinic and other health care organizations leading the personalized medicine revolution that relies on compiling and analyzing patients’ genetic code to better diagnose, predict, and treat disease.

“We generated 90 trillion base pairs of sequence last year,” says Eric Wieben, PhD, director of Mayo’s Medical Genome Facility in Rochester, Minn. “Gathering big piles of data is the easy part. It’s trying to transform the data into knowledge that’s the hard part.”

My latest in CAP TODAY’s Newsbytes section. Read the whole shebang.

Despite an explosion of research into cancer biomarkers and professional guidelines that urge testing for certain genetic mutations that help detect disease, anticipate its course, or predict response to treatment, many cancer centers are out of sync with oncology testing recommendations.

Payment policies, regulatory oversight, clinician preferences, and varying access to testing technology are among the factors that contribute to discrepancies in cancer care.

So says Jan A. Nowak, MD, PhD. And he is worth hearing out on the subject, as did an audience of hundreds of pathologists, oncologists, and others at this year’s Cancer Biomarkers Conference in Houston.

“Adoption of biomarker cancer testing is not high among cancer centers,” Dr. Nowak told the crowd. “It seems high to us because . . . we go to the meetings and we talk to each other, and we’re doing this stuff. But then there are the people who are not going to the meetings, not talking about it, and not doing it.”

My latest feature article in CAP TODAY. Read the whole shebang.