Time, Money, and Lives Blog

No two days in a gross room are the same. I experienced this first hand as a technician before I came to work at Voicebrook. Maybe, like me, you are a biopsy technician and receive the surprise ECC that takes 30 cassettes to entirely submit, or maybe you are PA and receive the surprise derm frozen that requires all hands on deck. No matter your role, you never know what curveballs the day has in store for you.

Did you know that the average person living in America now spends ten or more hours a day in front of a screen? This trend is not slowing down! For most people, work is taking up most of this screen time. In fact, you may be looking at a “screen saver” of some trees or a green field, just to remind you of what the outside world looked like…oh memories. I can't reverse this trend, but I might be able to offer a few suggestions to decrease the number of issues you face while in front of that screen.

On May 17, the CAP Structured Data Team discovered an important error in its template for the Endometrium electronic Cancer Checklist (eCC) released in June 2017 and February 2018. The error involves incorrect text in the reportText attribute for two questions:

• ?Number of Para-aortic Nodes with isolated Tumor Cells (0.2 mm or less)#
• ?Laterality of Para-aortic Node(s) with Tumor

The reportText attribute contained the text "Pelvic Nodes" instead of "Para-aortic Nodes."

Healthcare organizations around the world have discovered the benefits of "big data" thanks to the enormous amounts of data available from electronic health records (EHRs). Up to now, though, the data have been largely unstructured, especially in Anatomic Pathology. This has meant that it is not always easy to mine the data for effective analysis, but that is changing. Many organizations are moving towards synoptic reporting and structured data capture.The difference between the two is subtle, but important. Synoptic reports are formatted for easy consumption by the human eye while structured data are formatted to be sorted, stored, and analyzed by computers.

The College of American Pathologists (CAP) is continuously improving its protocols, and it can be a challenge for Pathology departments to maintain their electronic versions and keep pace with the changes. On its website, CAP offers resources and links to partners who can help accredited laboratories stay up to date with the latest versions of the checklists