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False negatives and false positives in medical labs cost money and lives. An expert in pathology quality compares the present error rates to 1% of all airlines crashing. That got my attention. We should either start riding the train or put some checks and balances in place.

Hospitals move to cut dangerous lab errors

Diagnosed with a deadly neuroendocrine cancer at age 34, Kim Tutt was told she might have just months to live. After five surgeries to excise a cyst under her gum, remove her lower jaw and teeth, and reconstruct her face with bone taken from her lower leg, the Tyler, Texas, mother of two heard some shocking news: The slides from the biopsy of her cyst had been contaminated by cells from another patient, and she had never had cancer in the first place.

For patients, some of the most devastating medical mistakes can start in the lab, where studies show that 3 percent to 5 percent of the billions of specimens taken each year are defective, be it a biopsy that doesn't extract the tumor cells, blood that isn't drawn correctly or a mix-up with another patient's sample. The error rate is significantly higher and more dangerous in common tests for many cancers, where a false positive may lead to unnecessary surgery or a false negative can miss a deadly skin cancer.

Now hospitals and health-care-quality groups around the country are working on initiatives to bring more rigorous standards to pathology labs...

"Tests fail because things can go wrong at every step of the process, and there are no checks and balances in place in pathology to catch these errors," says Stephen Raab, director of the center for pathology quality and health-care research at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who is leading the lab-safety collaborative. While only about 1 percent of errors lead to serious harm or delays in treatment, he says, "You wouldn't want to have 1 percent of all airlines crashing."

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