Category Ranking

98%

Total Visits

921

Avg Visit Duration

2 minutes

Citations

20

Article Abstract

Health systems face intense pressure to decrease costs and improve services as the health care delivery system in the United States undergoes tremendous change due to health care reform. As health systems grow, like any business, they are forced to explore standardization to realize and maintain efficient practices. Clinical services, such as laboratory medicine, are more difficult to integrate due to wider variation in acceptable practice and culture, compared with other services. However, changes to laboratory service are imperative if health care professionals expect to survive and thrive in the new business environment. In this article, I describe the advocation efforts of the System Laboratory Council group toward implementation of a standardization process that we call integration, to improve the efficiency of the Laboratory Services department of our health system, the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS).

Download full-text PDF

Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/labmed/lmw069DOI Listing

Publication Analysis

Top Keywords

health care
12
health system
8
health systems
8
health
7
laboratory
5
system
5
laboratory integration
4
integration consolidation
4
consolidation regional
4
regional health
4

Similar Publications

Complexity and Health Care Utilization in Infant ESKD.

Kidney360

September 2025

Department of Pediatrics, Division of Pediatric Nephrology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, United States.

Background: Dialysis in neonates with ESKD is often associated with multiple comorbidities and the need for more intensified dialysis regimens. With recent advances in prenatal interventions and infant specific KRT, survival of neonates with ESKD has improved over the last decade. Little is known however about the impact on the health care system of improved survival in this population.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Synovial MS4A4A correlates with inflammation and counteracts response to corticosteroids in arthritis.

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

September 2025

Centre for Experimental Medicine & Rheumatology, William Harvey Research Institute and Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary University of London, London EC1M 6BQ, United Kingdom.

MS4A4A belongs to the MS4A tetraspan protein superfamily and is selectively expressed by the monocyte-macrophage lineage. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the role of MS4A4A+ macrophages in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) pathogenesis and response to treatment. RNA sequencing and immunohistochemistry of synovial samples from either early treatment-naïve or active chronic RA patients showed that MS4A4A expression positively correlated with synovial inflammation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The education of health care professionals is essential to maintaining standards of medical competence and access to care by patients. Inherent in the education of health care professionals is the problem of disparity in power and authority, including the power of teachers over learners and the power of practitioners over patients. Although there is a continuum of supervision levels and independence from student to resident to fellow, the ethical issues that arise during interactions among all teachers, learners, and their patients are similar.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Importance: As obesity rates rise in the US, managing associated metabolic comorbidities presents a growing burden to the health care system. While bariatric surgery has shown promise in mitigating established metabolic conditions, no large studies have quantified the risk of developing major obesity-related comorbidities after bariatric surgery.

Objective: To identify common metabolic phenotypes for patients eligible for bariatric surgery and to estimate crude and adjusted incidence rates of additional metabolic comorbidities associated with bariatric surgery compared with weight management program (WMP) alone.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF