What are you looking forward to at this year's AACC Annual Meeting and Clinical Lab Expo?
William Clarke, PhD, DABCC, FACB
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Baltimore
"I'm looking forward to the session 'Oral Fluid as an Alternate Specimen for Workplace, Clinical, and Forensic Toxicology' that will take place on Tuesday morning, July 30. There is a lot of interest around the use of oral fluid for both therapeutic drug monitoring and toxicology. However, how drugs are distributed into that matrix is not well understood on a case-by-case basis. I'm interested to hear the latest advances in that area and how that might inform our clinical and research practices."
Nichole Korpi-Steiner, PhD, DABCC, FACB
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, N.C.
"With rapid changes occurring in the healthcare landscape, I look forward to hearing insight into the future of lab test reimbursement and regulation of laboratory-developed tests at the AACC/ASCLS Healthcare Forum Wednesday afternoon, July 31. Additionally, with increasing utilization of and requests for coagulation analysis by thromboelastography at UNC, I am interested in learning more about clinical applications and the value of laboratory algorithms with viscoelastic tests during a symposium on this topic Tuesday morning, July 30."
Raul Benavides, MD
Baylor University Medical Center
Dallas
"The AACC Clinical Lab Expo serves as our system's springboard to surveying the landscape of chemistry and automation platforms, and I look forward to connecting with vendors and fellow clinical chemists on that subject. In addition, our system is looking to publish more extensively, and we look forward to the presentations and poster sessions to see what the hot topics are."
Amitava Dasgupta, PhD, DABCC, FACB
The University of Texas Health Sciences Center
Houston
"I attend the AACC Annual Meeting to learn new scientific methods and new assays that we may want to implement in our laboratory. It is impossible to introduce a new assay just based on published papers. When an expert in the field delivers a lecture at the AACC Annual Meeting, I can ask questions and discuss it with the speaker after the symposium is over and get really good professional advice regarding the usefulness of a new method or assay. It would cost me thousands of dollars to get this expert opinion on an individual basis outside of the meeting."