I will be delivering a lecture to the 42nd annual Congress of the Brazilian Society of Clinical Pathology (Sociedade Brasileira de Patologia Clínica; SBPC) on July 3, 2008, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The lecture is entitled "Integrated Diagnostics Emerges as a Key Element in Healthcare." The lecture will address the development of integrated diagnostic centers (IDCs) which I believe will play an important role in the future of healthcare delivery. Below is a summary of this presentation that I was asked to write for the SBPC web site.
The general field of diagnostics, with molecular diagnostics and medical imaging at its core, is undergoing an explosion of knowledge providing the potential to diagnose disease in its pre-clinical pre-symptomatic stage before any physical manifestations are present. Such a new approach to healthcare will be very disruptive for clinicians who have been trained to suspect the presence of disease on the basis of a patient history and a physical exam. This new perspective on disease diagnosis sets the stage for the emergence of "integrated diagnostic centers" (IDCs) staffed by pathologists, lab medicine specialists, and radiologists. A patient would be referred to an IDC by a primary care physician, at which time the physicians in the diagnostic center would assume total responsibility for diagnosing the patient's disease, assessing the prognosis of the disease, and making some therapeutic recommendations. This IDC concept is well known in Brazil where it has already been executed on a large-scale basis.
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