We are saddened to hear of the passing of IAP member Dr. John Eble. 

The former chair of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Nordschow Professor of Laboratory Medicine, he passed away at the age of 71 on Monday, August 21, 2023.

An internationally known expert in Urologic Pathology, he also contributed as a presenter at three IAP Spring Slide Seminars, including the 2006 seminar which hosted Juan Rosai, MD and other renowned IU Department of Pathology faculty members.

A Celebration of John's Life will be held at Aaron-Ruben-Nelson Funeral Home, 11411 N. Michigan Road on Friday, September 8, 2023 from 3pm-7pm.

The IUSM tribute is linked here

Dr. Arthur C. Jay passed away on March 21, 2022. He graduated from Shortridge High School, Butler University and Indiana University School of Medicine.

He served in the U.S. Army from 1961-1963 and attended the Forensic Pathology course at the Armed Forces Institute in 1966, beginning his residency at Methodist Hospital that same year. At Ball Hospital he was a partner in Pathology Associated Laboratories and Director of Blood Bank, Immunology-Serology and Microbiology. was Director of Chemistry, Immunology-Serology and Microbiology. Bartholomew County Hospital nd practiced at Dearborn County, Scott County, and King's Daughters hospitals, retiring in 2008.

Dr. Jay joined the Indiana Association of Pathologists in 1966 as a Junior Member during his Methodist residency. He was a very active member of the IAP, serving on the Legislative Committee for many years. Even after retiring from practice, he still continued to help the IAP when legislative issues arose.

The family asked that gifts be made to the Ohio County Community Foundation and the Indiana Medical History Museum.

A more detailed obituary can be read on the IndyStar website.

IndyStar Obituary

https://www.indystar.com/obituaries/ins135649

Barry Ziman, CAP's  Director Legislative & Political Affairs, Department of Advocacy and Policy, has notified the IAP's leadership that Indiana's OON Law does not meet criteria for disputing payments and the law will be superseded by the Federal No Surprises Law.  This is good news for pathologists. The CAP and the IAP actively opposed the Indiana Law because it placed the decisions for payment solely in the hands of the insurance companies.

The entire letter from CMS to State Government can be read here.

By Darrell Davidson, MD, PhD

It is with great sadness that we learned of the passing of Dr. Juan (born Giovanni) Rosai, M.D., co-author or primary author of 6 editions of Ackerman’s Surgical Pathology beginning in 1981. As a case presentation speaker, Dr. Rosai was widely sought by pathology seminar organizers throughout the world. The Indiana Association of Pathologists was fortunate to have Dr. Rosai agree to speak at our Spring Slide Seminar in 2006. With incisiveness and humor, he jointly presented cases with our members, Sunil Badve, M.D., Steven Billings, M.D., Stephen Bonsib, M.D., Oscar Cummings, M.D., John Eble, M.D., John Henley, M.D., Romil Saxena, M.D., and Thomas Ulbright, M.D. Dr. Rosai had politely declined prior invitations, explaining that his publisher had essentially put him on house arrest to make the deadline for the 9th edition of his 2-volume text. Invited to speak again at subsequent Indiana Association of Pathologists’ seminars, he again declined, explaining that Parkinson’s Disease had made it impossible for him to travel.

Nevertheless, Dr. Rosai indomitably created two more editions of the definitive compendium of anatomic pathology. Slide seminars occasionally enjoyed his delightful presence, although, in recent years, he was forced to make virtual appearances. Dr. Rosai’s presentation at our 57th annual Spring Slide Seminar will be a lasting memory in proportion to the performance of Dr. Arthur Purdy Stout at the first Indiana Association of Pathologists’ Slide Seminar in 1949.

By Lawrence M. Roth, MD, Professor Emeritus

IU School of Medicine, Dept. of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine

Juan Rosai was born in Poppi, a small town near Florence in the region of Tuscany, Italy in 1940 and died July 9, 2020 from complications of Parkinson’s disease. When he was eight years old, his parents immigrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina because of the economic problems in Italy following the Second World War. There, his first name was changed from the Italian name Giovani to the Spanish equivalent Juan. At the age of 15, Rosai enrolled at the School of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires. In his third year of medical school, he met Eduardo Lascano who inspired Rosai’s interest in the discipline of Pathology, and Rosai subsequently trained in Anatomic Pathology under the direction of Dr. Lascano at the same institution.

Rosai completed his pathology residency at Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri under the mentorship of Professor Lauren V. Ackerman. He remained on the faculty of Washington University until 1974. At the age of 34, Rosai was appointed Professor and Director of Anatomic Pathology at the University of Minnesota. He left there in 1985 for a similar position at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, where he stayed until 1991. From 1991 to 1999, Rosai was the James Ewing Alumni Professor and Chairman of Pathology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

Rosai was the author of more than 400 scientific peer-reviewed papers on topics in pathology. Among the most notable was his seminal description of the entity known as sinus histiocytosis with massive lymphadenopathy (Rosai-Dorfman disease) published in in 1969. He served as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Surgical Pathology until 2014.

At the beginning of the new millennium, Rosai permanently moved back to his homeland in Italy as Chairman of the Department of Anatomic Pathology at the Istituto Nazionale in dei Tumori (National Cancer Institute) in Milan, Italy. In 2005, he created the Center for Oncologic Pathology Consultations at the Centro Diagnostico Italiano in Milan, where he continued his consultation and educational activities focusing on oncological surgical pathology.

In 2006, Dr. Rosai was invited to give the 57th Spring Seminar of the Indiana Association of Pathology by Dr. Lawrence M. Roth, the Director of Surgical Pathology at Indiana University School of Medicine at the time and now Professor Emeritus of Pathology at the same institution. In 1949, Dr. Arthur Purdy Stout, renowned soft tissue pathologist from the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City presented the first Indiana Association of Pathologists seminar. The distinguished surgical pathologist Dr. Lauren V. Ackerman from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis also gave a seminar on soft tissue pathology in 1953. Subsequently, many other notable surgical pathologists gave seminars including Elson Helwig, who gave 2 seminars one on Diseases of the Alimentary Tract and the other on Dermal Pathology, David Dahlin, on Tumors of the Skeletal System, and Robert E. Scully on the Pathology of the Ovary, among others. Altogether, the Spring Seminar of the Indiana Association of Pathologists has a storied and long-lasting history.

  

Indiana Members of Congress Susan Brooks (R-5th District), Larry Buschon, M.D. (R-8th District), and Andre Carson (D-7th District) responded to a grassroots effort to grant a temporary waiver giving pathologists the regulatory flexibility to review pathology slides remotely. The Indiana Association of Pathologists joined the CAP-led effort by adding a letter to Indiana's representatives signed by IAP president Shaoxiong Chen, MD, PhD.

Read more about the CAP advocacy effort here March 26 CAP advocay update

Dr. Daniel J. LaMar, 65, of Lafayette, passed away unexpectedly on Thursday, March 19, 2020, after complications related to pneumonia. He was a graduate of the IU School of Medicine, 1980. He completed his residency in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology at Indiana University Medical Center in 1984.

Read Dr. LaMar's full obituary here   .Legacy.com obituary

With great sadness, we inform you that Dr. David Grignon has passed away after a brief period of illness with metastatic pancreatic carcinoma. Dr. Grignon was a professor and vice chairman of Department of pathology, Indiana University. He was a great teacher as well as a renowned GU pathologist, as evidenced by his extensive publications in the field, his endless lecture tours around the globe and his extensive consultation services. In 2017, Dr. Grignon presented at the 69th IAP Spring Slide Seminar. His contributions to GU pathology were immense and he will be deeply missed.

Please keep his family and friends in your thoughts during this difficult time. 

In honor of Dr. Grignon, the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine will establish a lectureship. Contributions may be made to IU Foundation in his name.

The CAP encourages pathologists impacted by Anthem’s payment reductions to review their contracts and to communicate any concerns directly with their respective Anthem regional network manager.

Links to more information from CAP are located on the Anthem reimbursement issues page. You must be logged in as a member to access the page.

Indiana PAMA Fact Sheet*

Millions of Indiana seniors depend on timely access to critical laboratory testing and diagnostic services for their health.

• Laboratories play an integral role in diagnosing common and complex diseases, including diabetes and cancers and are vital to early intervention and preventative care for patients across the country.
• Indiana alone has more than 100 hospital laboratories and over 1,500 independent and physician office laboratories—an expansive network that helps ensure Indiana’s seniors have access to the tests they need.
• All of these labs, including independent labs, hospital outreach labs, physician offices, ambulatory surgery centers, ESRD, specialty or nursing homes labs, make it possible for providers to identify and treat the most complex conditions Indianans face.

Indiana seniors face nearly $29 million in year-over-year cuts to the vital lab services they depend on.

• In 2014, Congress passed the Protecting Access to Medicare Act (PAMA) to safeguard seniors’ access to critical health services, including laboratory tests. However, as a result of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) flawed approach to PAMA implementation, seniors’ health is at risk.
• Under PAMA, Congress directed HHS to establish market-based reimbursement rates for clinical laboratories. However, the HHS Secretary disregarded Congress’ instruction, gathering rate information from less than 1% of laboratories nationwide.
• This skewed and incomplete data collection process ignores payment data from 99% of the market and has resulted in severe cuts to laboratory services.
• By drastically cutting rates, including for the top-25 most performed lab tests, HHS is threatening access to lab services for beneficiaries living with diabetes, heart disease, liver disease, kidney disease, prostate and colon cancers, anemia, infections, opioid dependency and countless other common health conditions.

As a result of this flawed data collection process, the cuts to lab services dramatically exceed original estimates from the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget, leading to an erosion of seniors’ benefits, particularly the most vulnerable and those in rural communities.

• Reducing access to clinical lab services will ultimately drive up the cost of care for the Medicare program and for beneficiaries, particularly those who reside in medically underserved communities.
• The laboratories serving these vulnerable populations stand to face the brunt of these cuts, which are estimated to reach nearly 30% in the first three years of PAMA with the potential for further reductions. Many of these labs will be forced to shut down operations, reduce services, eliminate tests and/or lay off employees.

The Laboratory Access for Beneficiaries Act (LAB Act)—bipartisan legislation recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives—is a common-sense solution that proposes a data-reporting delay of one year, which would allow CMS and other stakeholders time to address the flaws in the current reporting process and help protect seniors’ health.

• The LAB Act is a common-sense solution to protect seniors in Indiana and across the country. Suspending data reporting in 2020 accomplishes two critical goals:

o Allowing for a more representative share of labs to report private market data; and

o Providing valuable time for stakeholders and policymakers to determine how to reform PAMA and ensure a truly market-based system will protect Medicare beneficiaries’ services.

• Importantly, we would also recommend a required report from the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) on how to effectively support market based rates and does not reverse any of the cuts to labs already in place, instead putting the brakes on a flawed process and establishing a sustainable market-based approach to setting laboratory rates that can meet the needs of Indiana’s—and the country’s—seniors moving forward.

* This Indiana PAMA Fact Sheet was provided by the Indiana State Medical Association.