The Precision Medicine Laboratory at LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine has been fully accredited by the College of American Pathologists. The laboratory, conceived to bring Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies to the clinical arena, was built and launched over the past two years. The $2 million laboratory is a collaboration of the Departments of Pathology and Genetics. LSU Health New Orleans’ Precision Medicine Laboratory has been sequencing positive coronavirus patient samples to determine what strains of the virus are circulating in the New Orleans area.

Promising new education interventions are potentially being 'unnecessarily scrapped' because trials to test their effectiveness are insufficiently faithful to the original research, a study warns. Researchers ran a large-scale computer simulation to examine how much 'fidelity' compromises the results of school-based trials of new learning innovations and strategies. 'Fidelity' is the extent to which these evaluations adhere to the original research on which the educational intervention is based. At present, more than 60% of interventions are rejected at the evaluation stage because the trials, conducted by organisations such as the What Works Clearinghouse (US) and Education Endowment Foundation (UK), suggest they result in little educational progress. In many cases, however, the fidelity of these trials is not reported. The new study suggests that poor fidelity may mean that sound programmes are being rejected.

In order for nurses to lead in health and health care innovation, schools of nursing and nursing programs must think strategically about the knowledge and skills the next generation of nurses will need and then support those innovation needs at all levels of research, education, and practice.