Laboratory test results supply the foundation for most medical decisions. However, they are likely to feature more prominently in healthcare, given persistent trends in human health. These include ageing populations, higher rates of non-communicable diseases, and upticks in early-onset cancers, obesity, type 2 diabetes and other cardiometabolic and neurodegenerative diseases. Accuracy, fast turnaround times and access will always be the pillars of quality diagnostic testing. Yet, certain conditions within the healthcare landscape threaten that vital triad. Devising solutions to ensure these pillars remain intact will be essential to advancing human health worldwide. Over the past decade, the healthcare industry has faced a reverberating shortage of qualified professionals ' from lab technologists to nurses and doctors. Burnout fatigue among overworked staff is prevalent, and its ramifications are significant. In traditional diagnostic laboratories, for instance, mislabeled samples, transcription and other human errors compromise patient safety while driving up healthcare costs....

Will sunshine and warm weather bring an end to face masks, physical distancing and other pandemic mitigation tactics? Several states may be easing stay-at-home orders, but the joy of the release of COVID-19 restrictions may be short-lived.Summer may slow the spread of the coronavirus a bit, but it will back by fall with a second wave that looks a lot like the first wave, said a leading epidemiology researcher. And the immunity that will bring a real end to the pandemic may be a long time coming.Marc Lipsitch, DPhil, is professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics. He discussed the prospects for mitigating a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and the potential approaches to faster development of a vaccine, with JAMA Editor-in-Chief Howard Bauchner, MD, on Dr. Bauchner’s podcast, “Conversations with Dr. Bauchner.”...

If you were a medical researcher studying infectious disease three months ago and you had an idea for a project, getting that project funded, off the ground, in the lab, and in a journal would have taken you many, many months. Chances are, you’d see your work in a peer-reviewed publication not until this summer or even a year later.One of the more uplifting developments of the bleak past several weeks has been witnessing science rise to the occasion in the face of coronavirus. As the virus has spread across the globe, scientific research has sped up to keep pace with it. The urgency of coronavirus has jolted scientific research, normally a sclerotic process. Studies that once took months to execute and get to the public now take weeks, even days. In the process, we’ve been given a glimpse of what science might look like after the pandemic.How is the new, faster science manifesting itself? Use of preprint servers — where scientists post research that has not yet been peer reviewed — has spiked dramatically. Views and downloads are both up more than a hundredfold on medRxiv, a preprint server for medical papers. The number of new papers uploaded is up at least fivefold as well....