Bennet Omalu, MD, MBA, MPH, who gave the spotlight event speech at CAP ’15 earlier this month, says he met retired Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster before conducting the 2002 autopsy that would lead to the first diagnosis of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in a National Football League player.

“I met him on TV,” Dr. Omalu says. “All the channels were talking about this great NFL player who died suddenly, and talking about him in very derogatory ways. Many NFL players, when they retire, they don’t handle their money well. They become destitute and bankrupt.”

To the Nigerian-born Dr. Omalu, fresh from completing his neuropathology fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, football players scrambling across the field in headgear “looked like extraterrestrials.”

The lead item in this month’s “Put It on the Board.” Read the whole shebang.

As hospitals are brought under single health systems, laboratory leaders are faced with the task of ensuring that their clinical lab results are comparable among various sites and instruments. But some have had more opportunity than most to investigate the mischief afforded by variations in instruments, reagents, and more.

Dina N. Greene, PhD, found herself in that position. She worked for four years at Kaiser Permanente Northern California, where she served as a clinical chemistry consultant for its 21 hospital laboratories in the area and directed hemoglobinopathy and myeloma testing for the system’s regional laboratory.

“This is an increasing kind of problem with consolidation. As different universities acquire more hospitals and as hospital systems acquire other hospitals, it’s going to be an increasing challenge,” says Dr. Greene, now associate director of chemistry at the University of Washington Medical Center. She also is assistant professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine at UW, which she joined in December 2014.

“You have to standardize your equipment—that’s a fundamental part of this. Without standardizing the equipment, you just have so much more opportunity for wildly different results, especially if everything is going into the same electronic medical record,” Dr. Greene says.

Another feature from the October CAP TODAY. Read the whole shebang.

The advantages of molecular respiratory viral panels are accompanied by a challenge for laboratories that find it difficult to secure payment for testing that can cost hundreds of dollars, depending on the number of pathogens involved.

These respiratory panels can create complications for laboratories that must juggle several platforms to meet clinician needs, spare patients from unnecessary out-of-pocket costs, and responsibly use lab resources. A newly cleared flexible respiratory testing panel could offer laboratories another approach.

My cover story in the October edition of CAP TODAY. Read the whole shebang.