Media Coverage

There’s still a lot of work to do to bring the nation’s opioid crisis under control, but the health care industry needs to wake up and realize it’s only a matter of time before the same thing happens with a new drug. Over-prescribing other drugs could result in a new crisis, which is why prescription drug monitoring and additional training about the challenges of addiction is so critical for doctors.

Quest Diagnostics, Secaucus, NJ, and the precision testing company hc1, Indianapolis, have introduced a service to optimize the use of laboratory tests. Called Quest Lab Stewardship, the strategic collaboration will use the hc1 machine-learning platform to improve the clinical impact and cost of laboratory testing, both in and out of hospital settings.

Recognizing that safety concerns are paramount as decriminalization of cannabis continues in states throughout the U.S., the National Safety Council calls on employers to restrict cannabis use for those in safety sensitive positions – regardless of whether cannabis consumption is allowed by their state. In a policy position released today, NSC defines safety sensitive positions as those that impact the safety of the employee and the safety of others as a result of performing that job. Marijuana is the most frequently used illicit drug of abuse in the U.S. and the drug most often detected in workplace drug testing according to Quest Diagnostics.

Most primary care physicians (62%) fear the opioid drug crisis will be traded for a new prescription drug crisis and nearly three quarters (72%) worry that chronic pain patients will turn to illicit drugs if they do not have access to prescription opioids, according to a new Health Trends™ report from Secaucus-based Quest Diagnostics. Seventy percent of primary care physicians wish they had more training on how to taper their patients off opioids.

Recreational marijuana use is now legal (or about to be) in 11 states and Canada. Driving under its influence is not. But if police suspect someone is driving high, they’ll have a difficult time proving it: Marijuana tests typically rely on urine samples, take days to analyze, and may only indicate that someone has used marijuana over the past days or even weeks, not whether they are actively impaired. Marijuana is the most commonly flagged substance in workplace drug tests, according to Quest Diagnostics, which sells testing services to employers. Nearly 3% of all screenings the company processed in 2018 tested positively for the drug (4.4% of screenings tested positive for any substance).

Recreational genealogy firm Ancestry has partnered with Illumina and Quest Diagnostics to expand into health-related genetic testing. [CR-LF][CR-LF]The company today announced two services: AncestryHealth Core, which is available immediately and uses microarray genotyping performed by Illumina, and AncestryHealth Plus, a membership-based offering that will be available for customers in a few months using next-generation sequencing conducted by Quest Diagnostics. Physicians in telemedicine firm PWNHealth's network will review and approve customer orders based on online questionnaires , at which point patient saliva samples will be sent to the labs for analysis and reporting.

In June of 2018, Mark Pennington received troubling news from his ex-girlfriend, with whom he shared custody of their 2-year-old son. She had taken a hair follicle from the boy, she said, and had it analyzed at a lab. A drug test had returned positive for THC, the intoxicating compound in marijuana; evidently their son had been exposed to it, presumably in Mr. Pennington’s presence. He was told that, from then on, he would be permitted to see the child only once a week, and under supervision. [CR-LF]Barry Sample, the senior director of science and technology at Quest Diagnostics, the biggest purveyor of drug tests in the country, said he was familiar with the problem outlined in the 2012 paper, but said Quest Diagnostics did not use that methodology. “We use a different analytical procedure,” Dr. Sample said.

Genealogy giant Ancestry is getting into the business of healthcare. On Tuesday, the company announced two health products: AncestryHealth Core and AncestryHealth Plus, which can help users of the company's DNA test get a sense of their family health history. AncestryHealth Core will cost $149 — or $49 if users have already taken an Ancestry test — while Plus will cost $199, and additional quarterly updates after the first six months will cost $49 fee every six months. Here's what's included in the reports. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. For the first time, family-history website Ancestry will tell you about your genetic health.[CR-LF][CR-LF]Users who have already submitted their spit to Ancestry before don't have to submit a new samples. The products will take about 6-8 weeks to report after ordering, even for those who have already taken the Ancestry test. The company said it plans to have the Plus program available widely in 2020. To perform the next-generation sequencing test, Ancestry's partnering with lab-testing firm Quest Diagnostics.

More than half of the US.. states and roughly one-third of major U.S. industries saw their rates of workforce drug test positives climb over the past three years – with positives hitting their highest rates in 2018 in more than a decade, according to a series of recent reports from Quest Diagnostics.[CR-LF][CR-LF]Oregon, Maine, Vermont, Alabama, Louisiana and Massachusetts had the highest rates of positive results for urine-based drug tests, according to Quest's analysis of more than 10 million screenings for illicit substances. Across the country, 4.4% of the analyzed drug tests yielded positive results in 2018. In Oregon and Maine, however, more than 6% of the tests were positive last year.

Since 1988, federal regulations have required commercial drivers to submit urine samples for pre-employment, random, and post-accident testing for prohibited drugs.[CR-LF][CR-LF]Twenty years on, the Government Accountability Office (the investigative arm of Congress) published a study outlining serious challenges confronting the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in its oversight of the drug-testing program:[CR-LF][CR-LF]In more than 9% of compliance reviews conducted between 2001 and 2007, carriers had no drug-testing programs at all.Quest Diagnostics reported earlier this year a rise in urine specimens reported as invalid suggest more efforts to cheat.[CR-LF][CR-LF]Drug-testing labs are getting more sophisticated about catching cheaters, but at the same time cheaters are getting smarter about how they try to game the system.