This educational activity is designed to provide both didactic teaching around current clinical pathology issues and interactive discussion of current issues confronting the clinical laboratories.  Pathology residents are assigned current cases that illustrate important, problematic, or interesting issues in the particular Clinical Pathology Area in which they are rotating.  Presentations are developed under the guidance of teaching faculty, and are designed to occupy one half of the one-hour time frame.  These are intended to be highly interactive case presentations with a didactic portion that typically involves an in depth literature review. The second half of the conferences involves presentation of challenging on-call cases, with broad input from trainees and faculty regarding appropriate handling of such cases, including technical, reporting, medical, and laboratory management issues.

Clinical pathology encompasses the broad field of non-anatomic laboratory medicine.  It includes fields as diverse as clinical chemistry, molecular diagnostics, and transfusion medicine, and effectively intersects with every area of clinical medicine.  As such, the volume of information needed to competently practice clinical pathology is enormous, and each sub-discipline within clinical pathology is advancing rapidly due to continuous progress in knowledge and technology.  Furthermore, many patient care issues are cross multiple CP disciplines, yet they are often handled in “silos.”  This exercise promotes robust interdisciplinary discussion of patient care issues in the laboratory.  Additionally, lab management issues are an important part of clinical pathology practice, yet few educational exercise address competencies in this area.  Finally, this conference will routinely address issues of systems-based practice and practice-based learning and improvement, competencies that are traditionally difficult to address in CME programs.