When you go looking for problems, you’re bound to find them. That truism is especially pertinent in the arena of interface validation, as the team at New York’s North Shore-LIJ Health System discovered recently.

The laboratory professionals there were charged with helping to implement the first phase of a joint venture with New York City’s Health and Hospitals Corp. (HHC), in which North Shore-LIJ would serve as the massive public health system’s primary reference lab. Their job was to interface through middleware and validate, in just eight months, 840 HHC tests coming from 21 of that system’s sites. Meanwhile, the North Shore-LIJ team has had to contend with validating the plethora of electronic health record systems at more than 300 physician clients’ offices, as well as a customized smartphone application. North Shore-LIJ Laboratories has long performed interface validations, but they learned just how arduous it can be when so many have to be performed at once.

My latest cover story in CAP TODAY. Read the whole shebang. You can also check out the items I wrote for the “Put It on the Board” section on cervical cancer screening, genomic testing, regulation of lab-developed tests, and testing-related diagnostic errors.