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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.