Description
April 22, 2026
Medical Laboratory Professionals Week 2026
CPIP: Transfusion Medicine – Managing Patients With Indeterminate/Discrepant RhD Results
Adverse Cardiovascular Outcomes in Patients with Syphilis
The Future of Subspecialization in Pathology
Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.
Transcription
Composure in crisis. How a lab team in Kansas rallied during a cyber attack.
The computers were kind of acting a little funny. It kept logging us out of the system just randomly.
Their story of resilience and resourcefulness as U.S. Lab Week continues. This is Path News Network Daily Edition from the College of American Pathologists. I'm Nancy Johnson. It's Wednesday, April 22nd. This week during Medical Laboratory Professionals Week, the CAP has been celebrating the teams behind the scenes who serve patients no matter what challenges they encounter. But what happens to these teams when the technology they rely on goes dark? It's just one of many obstacles and transitions a team in Pittsburg, Kansas encountered. Trey Lunderman is the laboratory manager for a group of about 30 lab professionals at Mercy Hospital, Pittsburg, part of the nonprofit Mercy Catholic Healthcare System. In 2024, the team had already worked through two ownership changes and was preparing for a third when the cyber attack occurred. Lunderman says the team at first thought they'd be back up and running quickly.
We were completely computerless. All paper, paper orders, paper printouts, paper results. Everything was faxing by hand or tubing results to the floors or to the ER. So yeah, it's like you have a short moment of panic, like how are we going to keep up with this?
As days turned into weeks, Lunderman says his team found processes that worked. They communicated constantly with each other and with hospital departments using an extensive folder system to file results and get them to patients.
Each day we did this for a month and a half. So you can imagine a file cabinet's worth of results. I mean, over 20,000 results, you know, would have had to have been entered by hand when this thing was all done. So, but yeah, I mean, it's just like a little bit trial by error. You have to be fluid and you have to be able to adapt on the go.
Just as the lab team recovered from the cyber attack, they made an ownership transition from LabCorp you to Mercy Hospital Pittsburg. The change included a full laboratory information system conversion, a change to CAP accreditation standards, a new blood banking system, and much more. Throughout the transition, Lunderman says his veteran team took the extra training, preparation, and long hours in stride.
It's just a great group of techs out there that really came together. They knew how to support each other. And most importantly, they all had one common goal, and that was definitely to take care of our patients regardless of what was happening. So they knew it was going to be a challenge, and they knew it was going to be difficult. But, you know, they knew they had to get through it for our patients.
Check the link in the show notes for ways you can celebrate Lab Week professionals. You can also share your lab story and how the CAP supports you. Most people know their blood type, A, B, AB, or O. They sometimes know whether their Rh factor, the D antigen on their red blood cells, is positive or negative. Knowing the RhD status is particularly important for a pregnant woman to ensure a safe delivery. But in the blood bank, pathologists can encounter discrepancies in RhD testing or even inconclusive results due to testing methods, reagent types, and other issues. A new course in the CAP's CPIP, or Clinical Pathology Improvement Program, addresses these discrepancies. During the course, participants will review which RHD variants can place patients at risk for forming anti-D antibodies, future hemolytic reactions, and complications during a future pregnancy. The course will also cover how molecular testing can be used. To identify these at-risk patients, learn about the CPIP course under the Clinical Pathology Program section on the CAP's education page. It's a jarring statistic. From 2018 to 2023, there was a 50% increase in syphilis cases in the U.S. The resurgence, more prevalent in the South, prompted researchers from Tulane University Thank you. and the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Healthcare System to investigate the long-term risk of the disease. To do so, they studied patients from a New Orleans healthcare system from 2011 to 2025, including nearly 1,500 patients with any stage of syphilis and more than 7,000 uninfected matched control patients. Their findings, recently published in JAMA Network Open, found that adults with later stage syphilis were more likely to develop major cardiovascular problems, including stroke, heart attack, or aortic aneurysm, than similar patients without the infection. The authors said the work is an early step toward understanding how infectious diseases such as syphilis may add to cardiovascular risk, potentially through chronic inflammation. And finally, is the generalist pathologist slowly going the way of glass slides? In a new perspective piece in The Pathologist magazine, Dr. Darius Boris, an orthopedic pathologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, says digital pathology and artificial intelligence are rapidly moving the field toward a model in which, quote, subspecialization becomes not simply advantageous, but essential. you Dr. Boris, a CAP member, explores the increasing importance of concentrated expertise in identifying uncommon tumors and specimens. He stresses the nuanced pattern recognition skills specialists have in reviewing digital and AI analysis. While new technology won't replace pathologists, he says the most value will come from those who can combine subspecialty knowledge. with molecular diagnostics and digital technologies. That does it for today's edition. Be sure to check the show notes for more information on today's stories. Got a story you'd like for us to cover on the Daily Edition? Write to us at stories at cap.org. We're back at 5 a.m. Eastern for another episode of the Daily Edition. I'm Nancy Johnson. Have a great day.
Description
April 22, 2026
Medical Laboratory Professionals Week 2026
CPIP: Transfusion Medicine – Managing Patients With Indeterminate/Discrepant RhD Results
Adverse Cardiovascular Outcomes in Patients with Syphilis
The Future of Subspecialization in Pathology
Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.
Transcription
Composure in crisis. How a lab team in Kansas rallied during a cyber attack.
The computers were kind of acting a little funny. It kept logging us out of the system just randomly.
Their story of resilience and resourcefulness as U.S. Lab Week continues. This is Path News Network Daily Edition from the College of American Pathologists. I'm Nancy Johnson. It's Wednesday, April 22nd. This week during Medical Laboratory Professionals Week, the CAP has been celebrating the teams behind the scenes who serve patients no matter what challenges they encounter. But what happens to these teams when the technology they rely on goes dark? It's just one of many obstacles and transitions a team in Pittsburg, Kansas encountered. Trey Lunderman is the laboratory manager for a group of about 30 lab professionals at Mercy Hospital, Pittsburg, part of the nonprofit Mercy Catholic Healthcare System. In 2024, the team had already worked through two ownership changes and was preparing for a third when the cyber attack occurred. Lunderman says the team at first thought they'd be back up and running quickly.
We were completely computerless. All paper, paper orders, paper printouts, paper results. Everything was faxing by hand or tubing results to the floors or to the ER. So yeah, it's like you have a short moment of panic, like how are we going to keep up with this?
As days turned into weeks, Lunderman says his team found processes that worked. They communicated constantly with each other and with hospital departments using an extensive folder system to file results and get them to patients.
Each day we did this for a month and a half. So you can imagine a file cabinet's worth of results. I mean, over 20,000 results, you know, would have had to have been entered by hand when this thing was all done. So, but yeah, I mean, it's just like a little bit trial by error. You have to be fluid and you have to be able to adapt on the go.
Just as the lab team recovered from the cyber attack, they made an ownership transition from LabCorp you to Mercy Hospital Pittsburg. The change included a full laboratory information system conversion, a change to CAP accreditation standards, a new blood banking system, and much more. Throughout the transition, Lunderman says his veteran team took the extra training, preparation, and long hours in stride.
It's just a great group of techs out there that really came together. They knew how to support each other. And most importantly, they all had one common goal, and that was definitely to take care of our patients regardless of what was happening. So they knew it was going to be a challenge, and they knew it was going to be difficult. But, you know, they knew they had to get through it for our patients.
Check the link in the show notes for ways you can celebrate Lab Week professionals. You can also share your lab story and how the CAP supports you. Most people know their blood type, A, B, AB, or O. They sometimes know whether their Rh factor, the D antigen on their red blood cells, is positive or negative. Knowing the RhD status is particularly important for a pregnant woman to ensure a safe delivery. But in the blood bank, pathologists can encounter discrepancies in RhD testing or even inconclusive results due to testing methods, reagent types, and other issues. A new course in the CAP's CPIP, or Clinical Pathology Improvement Program, addresses these discrepancies. During the course, participants will review which RHD variants can place patients at risk for forming anti-D antibodies, future hemolytic reactions, and complications during a future pregnancy. The course will also cover how molecular testing can be used. To identify these at-risk patients, learn about the CPIP course under the Clinical Pathology Program section on the CAP's education page. It's a jarring statistic. From 2018 to 2023, there was a 50% increase in syphilis cases in the U.S. The resurgence, more prevalent in the South, prompted researchers from Tulane University Thank you. and the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Healthcare System to investigate the long-term risk of the disease. To do so, they studied patients from a New Orleans healthcare system from 2011 to 2025, including nearly 1,500 patients with any stage of syphilis and more than 7,000 uninfected matched control patients. Their findings, recently published in JAMA Network Open, found that adults with later stage syphilis were more likely to develop major cardiovascular problems, including stroke, heart attack, or aortic aneurysm, than similar patients without the infection. The authors said the work is an early step toward understanding how infectious diseases such as syphilis may add to cardiovascular risk, potentially through chronic inflammation. And finally, is the generalist pathologist slowly going the way of glass slides? In a new perspective piece in The Pathologist magazine, Dr. Darius Boris, an orthopedic pathologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, says digital pathology and artificial intelligence are rapidly moving the field toward a model in which, quote, subspecialization becomes not simply advantageous, but essential. you Dr. Boris, a CAP member, explores the increasing importance of concentrated expertise in identifying uncommon tumors and specimens. He stresses the nuanced pattern recognition skills specialists have in reviewing digital and AI analysis. While new technology won't replace pathologists, he says the most value will come from those who can combine subspecialty knowledge. with molecular diagnostics and digital technologies. That does it for today's edition. Be sure to check the show notes for more information on today's stories. Got a story you'd like for us to cover on the Daily Edition? Write to us at stories at cap.org. We're back at 5 a.m. Eastern for another episode of the Daily Edition. I'm Nancy Johnson. Have a great day.
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Description
April 22, 2026
Medical Laboratory Professionals Week 2026
CPIP: Transfusion Medicine – Managing Patients With Indeterminate/Discrepant RhD Results
Adverse Cardiovascular Outcomes in Patients with Syphilis
The Future of Subspecialization in Pathology
Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.
Transcription
Composure in crisis. How a lab team in Kansas rallied during a cyber attack.
The computers were kind of acting a little funny. It kept logging us out of the system just randomly.
Their story of resilience and resourcefulness as U.S. Lab Week continues. This is Path News Network Daily Edition from the College of American Pathologists. I'm Nancy Johnson. It's Wednesday, April 22nd. This week during Medical Laboratory Professionals Week, the CAP has been celebrating the teams behind the scenes who serve patients no matter what challenges they encounter. But what happens to these teams when the technology they rely on goes dark? It's just one of many obstacles and transitions a team in Pittsburg, Kansas encountered. Trey Lunderman is the laboratory manager for a group of about 30 lab professionals at Mercy Hospital, Pittsburg, part of the nonprofit Mercy Catholic Healthcare System. In 2024, the team had already worked through two ownership changes and was preparing for a third when the cyber attack occurred. Lunderman says the team at first thought they'd be back up and running quickly.
We were completely computerless. All paper, paper orders, paper printouts, paper results. Everything was faxing by hand or tubing results to the floors or to the ER. So yeah, it's like you have a short moment of panic, like how are we going to keep up with this?
As days turned into weeks, Lunderman says his team found processes that worked. They communicated constantly with each other and with hospital departments using an extensive folder system to file results and get them to patients.
Each day we did this for a month and a half. So you can imagine a file cabinet's worth of results. I mean, over 20,000 results, you know, would have had to have been entered by hand when this thing was all done. So, but yeah, I mean, it's just like a little bit trial by error. You have to be fluid and you have to be able to adapt on the go.
Just as the lab team recovered from the cyber attack, they made an ownership transition from LabCorp you to Mercy Hospital Pittsburg. The change included a full laboratory information system conversion, a change to CAP accreditation standards, a new blood banking system, and much more. Throughout the transition, Lunderman says his veteran team took the extra training, preparation, and long hours in stride.
It's just a great group of techs out there that really came together. They knew how to support each other. And most importantly, they all had one common goal, and that was definitely to take care of our patients regardless of what was happening. So they knew it was going to be a challenge, and they knew it was going to be difficult. But, you know, they knew they had to get through it for our patients.
Check the link in the show notes for ways you can celebrate Lab Week professionals. You can also share your lab story and how the CAP supports you. Most people know their blood type, A, B, AB, or O. They sometimes know whether their Rh factor, the D antigen on their red blood cells, is positive or negative. Knowing the RhD status is particularly important for a pregnant woman to ensure a safe delivery. But in the blood bank, pathologists can encounter discrepancies in RhD testing or even inconclusive results due to testing methods, reagent types, and other issues. A new course in the CAP's CPIP, or Clinical Pathology Improvement Program, addresses these discrepancies. During the course, participants will review which RHD variants can place patients at risk for forming anti-D antibodies, future hemolytic reactions, and complications during a future pregnancy. The course will also cover how molecular testing can be used. To identify these at-risk patients, learn about the CPIP course under the Clinical Pathology Program section on the CAP's education page. It's a jarring statistic. From 2018 to 2023, there was a 50% increase in syphilis cases in the U.S. The resurgence, more prevalent in the South, prompted researchers from Tulane University Thank you. and the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Healthcare System to investigate the long-term risk of the disease. To do so, they studied patients from a New Orleans healthcare system from 2011 to 2025, including nearly 1,500 patients with any stage of syphilis and more than 7,000 uninfected matched control patients. Their findings, recently published in JAMA Network Open, found that adults with later stage syphilis were more likely to develop major cardiovascular problems, including stroke, heart attack, or aortic aneurysm, than similar patients without the infection. The authors said the work is an early step toward understanding how infectious diseases such as syphilis may add to cardiovascular risk, potentially through chronic inflammation. And finally, is the generalist pathologist slowly going the way of glass slides? In a new perspective piece in The Pathologist magazine, Dr. Darius Boris, an orthopedic pathologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, says digital pathology and artificial intelligence are rapidly moving the field toward a model in which, quote, subspecialization becomes not simply advantageous, but essential. you Dr. Boris, a CAP member, explores the increasing importance of concentrated expertise in identifying uncommon tumors and specimens. He stresses the nuanced pattern recognition skills specialists have in reviewing digital and AI analysis. While new technology won't replace pathologists, he says the most value will come from those who can combine subspecialty knowledge. with molecular diagnostics and digital technologies. That does it for today's edition. Be sure to check the show notes for more information on today's stories. Got a story you'd like for us to cover on the Daily Edition? Write to us at stories at cap.org. We're back at 5 a.m. Eastern for another episode of the Daily Edition. I'm Nancy Johnson. Have a great day.
Description
April 22, 2026
Medical Laboratory Professionals Week 2026
CPIP: Transfusion Medicine – Managing Patients With Indeterminate/Discrepant RhD Results
Adverse Cardiovascular Outcomes in Patients with Syphilis
The Future of Subspecialization in Pathology
Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.
Transcription
Composure in crisis. How a lab team in Kansas rallied during a cyber attack.
The computers were kind of acting a little funny. It kept logging us out of the system just randomly.
Their story of resilience and resourcefulness as U.S. Lab Week continues. This is Path News Network Daily Edition from the College of American Pathologists. I'm Nancy Johnson. It's Wednesday, April 22nd. This week during Medical Laboratory Professionals Week, the CAP has been celebrating the teams behind the scenes who serve patients no matter what challenges they encounter. But what happens to these teams when the technology they rely on goes dark? It's just one of many obstacles and transitions a team in Pittsburg, Kansas encountered. Trey Lunderman is the laboratory manager for a group of about 30 lab professionals at Mercy Hospital, Pittsburg, part of the nonprofit Mercy Catholic Healthcare System. In 2024, the team had already worked through two ownership changes and was preparing for a third when the cyber attack occurred. Lunderman says the team at first thought they'd be back up and running quickly.
We were completely computerless. All paper, paper orders, paper printouts, paper results. Everything was faxing by hand or tubing results to the floors or to the ER. So yeah, it's like you have a short moment of panic, like how are we going to keep up with this?
As days turned into weeks, Lunderman says his team found processes that worked. They communicated constantly with each other and with hospital departments using an extensive folder system to file results and get them to patients.
Each day we did this for a month and a half. So you can imagine a file cabinet's worth of results. I mean, over 20,000 results, you know, would have had to have been entered by hand when this thing was all done. So, but yeah, I mean, it's just like a little bit trial by error. You have to be fluid and you have to be able to adapt on the go.
Just as the lab team recovered from the cyber attack, they made an ownership transition from LabCorp you to Mercy Hospital Pittsburg. The change included a full laboratory information system conversion, a change to CAP accreditation standards, a new blood banking system, and much more. Throughout the transition, Lunderman says his veteran team took the extra training, preparation, and long hours in stride.
It's just a great group of techs out there that really came together. They knew how to support each other. And most importantly, they all had one common goal, and that was definitely to take care of our patients regardless of what was happening. So they knew it was going to be a challenge, and they knew it was going to be difficult. But, you know, they knew they had to get through it for our patients.
Check the link in the show notes for ways you can celebrate Lab Week professionals. You can also share your lab story and how the CAP supports you. Most people know their blood type, A, B, AB, or O. They sometimes know whether their Rh factor, the D antigen on their red blood cells, is positive or negative. Knowing the RhD status is particularly important for a pregnant woman to ensure a safe delivery. But in the blood bank, pathologists can encounter discrepancies in RhD testing or even inconclusive results due to testing methods, reagent types, and other issues. A new course in the CAP's CPIP, or Clinical Pathology Improvement Program, addresses these discrepancies. During the course, participants will review which RHD variants can place patients at risk for forming anti-D antibodies, future hemolytic reactions, and complications during a future pregnancy. The course will also cover how molecular testing can be used. To identify these at-risk patients, learn about the CPIP course under the Clinical Pathology Program section on the CAP's education page. It's a jarring statistic. From 2018 to 2023, there was a 50% increase in syphilis cases in the U.S. The resurgence, more prevalent in the South, prompted researchers from Tulane University Thank you. and the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Healthcare System to investigate the long-term risk of the disease. To do so, they studied patients from a New Orleans healthcare system from 2011 to 2025, including nearly 1,500 patients with any stage of syphilis and more than 7,000 uninfected matched control patients. Their findings, recently published in JAMA Network Open, found that adults with later stage syphilis were more likely to develop major cardiovascular problems, including stroke, heart attack, or aortic aneurysm, than similar patients without the infection. The authors said the work is an early step toward understanding how infectious diseases such as syphilis may add to cardiovascular risk, potentially through chronic inflammation. And finally, is the generalist pathologist slowly going the way of glass slides? In a new perspective piece in The Pathologist magazine, Dr. Darius Boris, an orthopedic pathologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, says digital pathology and artificial intelligence are rapidly moving the field toward a model in which, quote, subspecialization becomes not simply advantageous, but essential. you Dr. Boris, a CAP member, explores the increasing importance of concentrated expertise in identifying uncommon tumors and specimens. He stresses the nuanced pattern recognition skills specialists have in reviewing digital and AI analysis. While new technology won't replace pathologists, he says the most value will come from those who can combine subspecialty knowledge. with molecular diagnostics and digital technologies. That does it for today's edition. Be sure to check the show notes for more information on today's stories. Got a story you'd like for us to cover on the Daily Edition? Write to us at stories at cap.org. We're back at 5 a.m. Eastern for another episode of the Daily Edition. I'm Nancy Johnson. Have a great day.
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