AFIP Director's Message: The Joint Pathology Center A New Beginning

A repository for bottle monsters (the unofficial blog for the National Museum of Health and Medicine) posted this AFIP Director's Message: The Joint Pathology Center A New Beginning.

As most of you know, the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) directed the Department of Defense to establish a Joint Pathology Center (JPC) that would provide diagnostic pathology services; pathology training; pathology research; and would modernize and update AFIP's current Tissue Repository, as long as creating such a center would be consistent with the final recommendations of the 2005 Defense Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission. The Commission, as I'm sure you recall, had recommended disestablishment of the AFIP.

I can now report to you that the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs has concluded that a Joint Pathology Center can indeed be established in DoD and still meet the requirements spelled out by both the BRAC Commission and the 2008 NDAA. I can further report that implementation plans are now being finalized to establish the Joint Pathology Center as part of the new Walter Reed National Military
Medical Center.

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Unfortunately digital pathology is not mentioned - more education is called for!  Seems as if the JPC could be a leader in using digital pathology to provide distributed services, such as access to the archived tissue bank...