Media Coverage

Earlier this year, five prominent healthcare organizations—Humana, MultiPlan, Quest Diagnostics, and UnitedHealth Group’s Optum and UnitedHealthcare—announced they would be launching a blockchain-based pilot program with the aim to improve healthcare data quality and reduce administrative costs.

An emerging bacterial threat, mycoplasma genitalium, that can be passed through sex is making some headlines across the pond as the British Association of Sexual Health and HIV recently drafted guidance aimed at better detecting and treating it. Commercial labs such as Quest Diagnostics offer a test for this STD.

The threat of Lyme disease has spread to all 50 states. Quest Diagnostics analyzed 6 million blood samples and found the tick-borne disease is now in 100 percent of the country. The most cases were in Pennsylvania, but the disease is also becoming more common in places like Florida and California.

The proportion of workplace drug tests detecting the use of marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamine is up sharply, from 3.2 percent in 2012 to 4.2 percent, according to Quest Diagnostics. With the Trump economy producing more jobs than applicants, some companies are simply dropping pot from their routine pre-employment drug screening. “Employers are saying, ‘We have a thin labor pool,’” employment lawyer James Reidy tells the Associated Press. “So are we going to test and exclude a whole group of people?”

Lyme disease is now in all 50 states and the number of cases is rising, according to a report from clinical laboratory Quest Diagnostics. The tick-borne illness, historically found mostly in the Northeast, is now growing rapidly in California and Florida, where it was not usually found in the past, according to a report from clinical laboratory Quest Diagnostics.