CLN Daily 2024
This fall, the Association for Diagnostics & Laboratory Medicine (ADLM, formerly AACC) will host its two key meetings, The International CPOCT Symposium and ADLM Middle East, covering the latest research in point-of-care testing (POCT) and diagnostics. Both events will seek to bring together international colleagues, discuss the benefits and potential downsides of new technology in laboratory medicine, and act as opportunities for different practitioners to share what has worked in their laboratories that could easily be applied around the world.
Allison Venner, PhD, FCACB, POCT, provincial medical lead at Alberta Precision Laboratories, sits on the planning committee for the POCT symposium. She said overall she’s looking forward to discussions and debates about POCT and seeing “unique perspectives from Canada and Europe to understand the difference in perception of POCT in these regions and how best to navigate those differences,” she said.
She hopes that attendees not as familiar with POCT will get to network with professionals who work with this kind of technology every day, “whether that’s around challenges for method validations or verification of POC testing, both in and outside the lab” she said.
Gerald Kost, MD, PhD, MS, FADLM, professor emeritus of pathology and laboratory medicine from the University of California, Davis, will kick off the conference with a keynote. Kost will highlight delivery of POCT in resource-limited settings.
Venner also expects artificial intelligence (AI) to be a common topic of conversation at the conference. AI in POCT will be covered throughout various sessions and in the closing keynote, which will be given by Naqi Khan, MD, MS, FAMIA, physician lead, analytics and machine learning, Worldwide Public Sector Healthcare Industry Team at Amazon Web Services.
His talk, titled “The Future of POCT: How IoMT Advancements in AI, Home Health Technologies, and Wearables Will Revolutionize Personalized Medicine,” will deal with the areas POCT has new opportunities, both from an AI and wearables perspective. Khan will discuss “how that can fit into personalized medicine to better focus on the patient,” Venner said.
Overall, “this is a really great international meeting and we’re trying to make sure we do have the opportunity for local and international participation so that we are catering to different perspectives,” she said.
In the same way, ADLM Middle East will be a mix of “what we traditionally see at an ADLM scientific meeting mixed together with faculty from the Middle East, who offer a unique perspective,” said Christopher Farnsworth, PhD, DABCC, FADLM, section head of clinical chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis and organizing chair of ADLM Middle East.
The program “really reflects all of laboratory medicine,” he said, including sessions dedicated to topics like infectious disease testing and recent advances in technology that many disciplines in laboratory medicine can employ. The committee wanted the topics to be broad so that they would apply to as many participants as possible and could be easily and quickly adapted into different kinds of laboratories.
"There are some traditional bread and butter topics, but it’s also very diverse and international,” he said of the program.
The automation session should be particularly exciting and fast moving, he said. In it, a panel of speakers will be given 10-15 minutes each to speak. “The goal is to compare and contrast some of the things we have seen in the microbiology laboratory for automation relative to what’s happening in chemistry,” he said, adding that there will be “key arguments about moving towards automation in both of those spaces, and arguments against it.” By putting microbiology and clinical chemistry together, he hopes that “one can pull from the other.”
He’s also looking forward to the keynote address from Stephen R. Master, MD, PhD, FADLM, chief of the division of laboratory medicine at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Overall, the organizing committee worked to make sure that professionals practicing in the Middle East will walk away from the meeting with something they can apply to their labs, Farnsworth said. That’s especially true in selecting sessions about data and building infrastructure for that data, which covers “how we apply data skills, how we apply data management, and how it’s done practically.”
The 29th International CPOCT Symposium: Quality Beyond the Lab: Navigating POCT Excellence in Patient Care, which will be held in San Diego, September 25-27. ADLM Middle East, a partnership of ADLM and Life Dx, will be held in Abu Dhabi, UAE, November 23-24.