ADLM 2025

In July, MLO staff attended this year’s annual meeting for the Association for Diagnostics and Laboratory Medicine (ADLM) in Chicago. I would love to share some of the information with you —

I attended two sessions pertaining to diagnostic stewardship. Some important takeaways from these sessions:

• Diagnosis of illness should be made with tests, and the illness should be identified and treated by diagnostic test results. One speaker pointed out that disease diagnosis does not have anything like the longstanding surgical checklist and pause.
• Goals for improving patient diagnoses include facilitating more effective teamwork in the diagnostic process among healthcare professionals, patients, and their families. Enhancing healthcare professionals’ education and training in the diagnostic process. Developing and deploying approaches to identify, learn from, and reduce diagnostic errors and near misses. Developing a reporting environment and learning system that facilitates improved diagnosis. Designing a payment and care delivery environment that supports the diagnostic process.
• A key challenge facing laboratories is helping patients and providers navigate increased test availability. Having a system where these requests can be handled systematically is very important. For new test requests, a multidisciplinary team and laboratory should evaluate these requests by reviewing current literature, clinical practice guidelines, and comparable in-house tests and then determine whether testing would be reimbursed.

I attended a press event hosted by Danaher Diagnostics (its major operating company is Beckman Coulter). The panelists talked about the company’s goal of bringing precision care (timely, highly accurate, accessible diagnostics) to the general public…in our hospitals, not just in large academia. "Accessible diagnostics" is defined as:

• Accurate and clinically meaningful by using sensitive biomarker assays and AI‑enhanced algorithms to inform early intervention and therapy selection.
• Scalable and affordable through high-throughput systems, standardized reagents, and integrated lab deployment to reduce per-test cost and complexity.
• Available across diverse settings, including small labs and large health systems alike.
• Minimally invasive and user‑friendly with automated workflows to ease adoption.

I also attended Siemens Healthineers’ press conference that summarized a survey of 408 U.S. physicians commissioned by Siemens. Separately, a survey of 1,000 U.S. patients, qualified by having had laboratory testing done within the past two years, was conducted during the same time frame to obtain the patient perspective. Noteworthy results of the surveys indicated the following:

·       98% of physicians have modified a diagnosis or treatment plan based on lab test results.

·       98% of physicians agree lab results help them justify their clinical course of action.

·       99% of physicians agree clinical lab testing is an integral part of the healthcare system.

·       93% of patients expect their doctor to order testing of interest to them upon their request.

·       87% of patients trust their doctor's recommendation if they advise against a test the patient requests.

I welcome your comments and questions — please send them to me at

[email protected].