ParaPathology

Beyond the glass — adjacent topics to diagnostic pathology that the group tracks and writes about

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What this is

ParaPathology is the group’s umbrella for work that sits next to — rather than inside — diagnostic pathology. Topics that shape how pathology is practiced, funded, taught, and communicated, but aren’t themselves “which diagnosis is this.”

Repository

What lives here

  • Pathologist workload and workflow — observational studies of how pathologists actually spend their time.
  • Education and training — curriculum notes, teaching experiments, trainee feedback loops.
  • Communication — how pathology results reach clinicians and patients, plain-language reporting, patient-facing summaries.
  • Policy and practice — guidelines, reporting standards, quality metrics as they change.
  • Tools of the trade — reviews of software, instruments, and services that pathologists use daily but rarely write about.

Adjacent work in the group

Contribution flow

  1. Pick a topic that’s pathology-adjacent and under-documented.
  2. Draft with a clear thesis — what is the single claim, and what evidence supports it?
  3. Link to primary data where applicable (operational studies in the Quality Research cluster are the usual source).

Conventions

  • Opinion is allowed, but mark it. “In our experience at Memorial…” is a useful qualifier.
  • Data beats anecdote. If the workstream has operational numbers available, cite them.
  • Respect the field’s diversity. Memorial’s practice patterns are not universal; frame recommendations as local unless they generalize.

Pitfalls

  • Don’t conflate ParaPathology essays with research outputs. These are reflection and synthesis pieces, not peer-reviewed claims.
  • Keep policy discussions up to date — guidelines change; a note from 2022 may mislead a reader in 2026.

In the research wiki

  • ParaPathology — the repository’s pointer page: seven years of notes, and a section breakdown showing where the substance is.
  • Laboratory Workload Measurement — the measurement counterpart to the workload essays — comparable units of staff time, so a claim about workload can be argued rather than asserted.
  • Turnaround Time — the operational metric behind most practice-pattern arguments.
  • Synoptic Reporting — structured reporting and plain-language reporting are the same argument seen from two ends.
  • Survival Analysis Workflow — one of three pages the collection’s 64-file statistics section should be read against first.
  • Descriptive Tables — another of them, and the cheapest place to start.