Media Coverage

Welcome to the "Lessons from the C-suite" series, featuring Advisory Board President Eric Larsen's conversations with the most influential leaders in health care.[CR-LF][CR-LF]In this edition, Steve Rusckowski, chair, president, and CEO of Quest Diagnostics, talks about how diagnostic information services can inflect the country's $3.6 trillion in health care costs, the unexpected upside of the Theranos misadventure, and how Quest is thinking about the drawbacks—and benefits—of the landscape-changing regulatory shift known as PAMA.

Over the past year, I’ve spent time outside of the office helping two uncles, both of whom are struggling with medical conditions exacerbated by their advanced ages. This has been neither a burden nor an obligation; I consider it a privilege to be able to help provide loving care for the two of them.[CR-LF][CR-LF]According to a recent survey by Quest Diagnostics, 2 in 5 older Americans with chronic conditions reported that they do not tell their doctor about loneliness, isolation, transportation barriers and other factors that influence health, with many admitting they "struggle to stay on top of my health issues and need more support."

Further, physicians may not be as prepared as they think when it comes to spotting signs of misuse: 83% of physicians believe they're able to adequately screen for prescription drug misuse, yet more than half of all patient test results processed by Quest Diagnostics for prescription drug monitoring showed signs of misuse.

A New Jersey federal judge on Friday gave her initial approval to a $195,000 deal in a proposed class action against Quest Diagnostics Inc. over a November 2016 data breach that exposed the personal information of about 34,000 customers.

There’s at least some data to back that up, according to (the aptly-named) Dr. Barry Sample, a senior director at Quest Diagnostics, a company that conducts more than 10 million workforce drug tests annually.[CR-LF][CR-LF]Sample leads the team that analyzes those tests. He said from 2015 to 2018, the number of drug tests performed that included marijuana dropped across the country, but most prominently in states where recreational weed is legal.

Quest Diagnostics and the bioinformatics company Hc1 have unveiled Quest Lab Stewardship, a service that uses machine learning to harmonize laboratory testing across health care systems in an effort to improve lab test utilization.[CR-LF][CR-LF]Quest Lab Stewardship “integrates in real-time with enterprise systems and leverages Hc1’s machine-learning capabilities to ingest, organize, and normalize lab data, alleviating the time and effort of manual data gathering and analysis,” according to a press announcement from Quest. “It also provides a framework for lab directors and hospital administrators to consult with medical staff to identify areas of concern and implement compendium updates and order prompting based on selected clinical guidelines.”

If you've been prescribed pain pills and think doctors are avoiding you as a new patient, you just might be right. [CR-LF][CR-LF]A large percentage of primary-care doctors (81%) say they're hesitant to accept new patients who've been prescribed pain meds, a newly released survey shows. Even more (83%) say the opioid crisis makes it harder to treat pain patients.[CR-LF]The new report, Drug Misuse in America 2019: Physicians Perspectives and Diagnostics Insights on the Evolving Drug Crisis, shows findings indicating that the opioid crisis continues to have a major impact on physicians and people in pain.

If you've been prescribed pain pills and think doctors are avoiding you as a new patient, you just might be right. [CR-LF][CR-LF]A large percentage of primary-care doctors (81%) say they're hesitant to accept new patients who've been prescribed pain meds, a newly released survey shows. Even more (83%) say the opioid crisis makes it harder to treat pain patients.[CR-LF]The new report, Drug Misuse in America 2019: Physicians Perspectives and Diagnostics Insights on the Evolving Drug Crisis, shows findings indicating that the opioid crisis continues to have a major impact on physicians and people in pain.

While reporting financial results for the third quarter on Tuesday, Quest Diagnostics Inc. (DGX) raised its earnings and adjusted earnings guidance for the full-year 2019. For fiscal 2019, the company now projects earnings in a range of $5.48 to $5.53 per share and adjusted earnings in a range of $6.45 to $6.50 per share on net revenues of about $7.72 billion.

Almost three-quarters of primary care physicians believe that their patients will take their controlled medications as prescribed, but more than half of drug-monitoring lab tests show signs of misuse, according to a new report from Quest Diagnostics.

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.

Historically low unemployment rates and increasing marijuana use has led some employers in states where recreational cannabis is legal to drop their zero-tolerance policies.[CR-LF][CR-LF]But not everyone is ready to make the leap.[CR-LF][CR-LF]As Illinois readies for recreational marijuana to become legal on Jan. 1, employers here are being told to consider how a zero-tolerance policy may affect their ability to recruit workers.[CR-LF][CR-LF]“Unemployment is so low that employers cannot insist on a zero-tolerance policy,” said Curtis Graves, staff attorney for the Denver-based Employers Council not-for-profit. The council has surveyed Colorado employers every other year since 2014 when recreational use of cannabis was legalized in the state.[CR-LF]Marijuana positivity increased by 75% from 2013 to 2016 in the general U.S. workforce, according to the Quest Diagnostics Drug Testing Index. Nearly 9% tested positive in 2016, according to Quest.

Q&A with David Freeman. Most people I talk to in pharma and biotech know that Quest Diagnostics is a leader in laboratory diagnostic services. What they often don’t know is the depth of the company's experience and capabilities in data, analytics and services across the development continuum. Beyond having over 48 billion clinical lab results in its database, Quest has 2,250 patient service centers, increasingly in retail locations, 20,000 mobile care professionals seeing patients in workplaces and the home. Quest provides services to half the country’s hospitals and physicians roughly a third of the adult U.S. population every year. The Clinical Insights portfolio started in 2015 with dialogue between Quest data scientists and medical directors with researchers in pharma who were trying to understand large patterns in disease progression, diagnosis and treatment. Those dialogues, which continue to this day, produce rich insights and customized at-scale data sets and analysis used for research and the planning of new therapeutic launches.

Op-ed: Is blockchain the technology that’s going to fix healthcare’s many problems? Potentially. But not now. Not even close. Before we can fix healthcare with blockchain, we need to break down the barriers that are preventing blockchain from fixing healthcare. The Synaptic Health Alliance pilot has been a cue about blockchain’s future in healthcare. Led by healthcare giants Aetna, Ascension, Humana, MultiPlan, Optum, UnitedHealthcare, and Quest Diagnostics, the program plans to use blockchain to reduce administrative costs and improve data quality. Early this year, other big-time players — Aetna, Anthem, Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC), PNC Bank, and IBM — announced a new collaborative that will leverage blockchain technology to enhance interoperability and transparency in healthcare. Many smaller partnerships continue to follow suit. However, it doesn't pay to be a guinea pig.

Hc1's software employs machine learning to prevent health systems from ordering too many or too few tests, a mistake that can lead to missed diagnoses and costly procedures.

According to a new analysis by Quest Diagnostics, one-third of U.S. industry sectors experienced year-over-year double-digit increases in workforce drug positivity between 2015 and 2018, with marijuana as the most commonly detected drug. The Quest Diagnostics Drug Testing Index is an analysis of more than 14 million urine drug tests of the general U.S. workforce in 17 different sectors.