Susquehanna Valley Section

January 2005 Meeting

The three hundred fifty-third meeting of the Section will be held on Wednesday, January 12, 2005 at Pine Barn Inn in Danville Pennsylvania. The guest speaker will be Jay B. Jones, Ph.D., DABCC who will present a talk entitled "Lab Automation - Expanding Tools of the Clinical Chemist". The dinner will begin at 6:30 p.m. and the lecture will start at 8:00 p.m. Both will take place at the Pine Barn Inn.

Dinner: The dinner will begin at 6:30 p.m. at the Pine Barn Inn. The dinner menu will be a choice of open-face prime rib or Georges Bank scrod, with house salad, dessert, and beverage. Cost of dinner $20.70. Please RSVP for dinner by Friday, January 7th to hokien@es.marywood.edu or 570-348-6211 ext. 2455.

Directions to the dinner and meeting:

From the East: Take Interstate 80 (I-80) WEST to Pennsylvania Exit #232 Buckhorn.** Turn left onto Route 42 SOUTH and continue for two miles. Bear right onto Route 11 SOUTH and continue about 7 miles into Danville. Turn right at the 3rd traffic light (by Dunkin' Donuts) onto Railroad St. Continue about 1/4 mile to the next traffic light. Pass straight through this light and the Pine Barn Inn will be on your immediate left with the Geisinger Medical Center straight ahead up the hill.

**Taking the Buckhorn exit (which is the next exit east of Danville) off of I- 80 will save you about six miles of driving when coming from the east.

From the South: From Baltimore follow I-83 NORTH towards Harrisburg, PA. Join Rte 322 WEST/I-81 SOUTH. After crossing the Susquehanna River on Rte 322 WEST, follow signs for Rt. 11 North. Take Rte 11 NORTH all the way to Danville, PA. In Danville, at the 3rd stoplight, from the left lane, go straight, joining Bloom St. Turn left onto North Academy Avenue at the next stoplight about 1/2 mile ahead. The Pine Barn Inn is on your immediate left after this left turn.

From the West: Take Interstate 80 (I-80) East to the Pennsylvania Exit #224 Danville. Bear right onto Route 54 EAST and continue into Danville -- about 3 miles -- to the 2nd stoplight. Turn left onto Route 11 NORTH, getting into the left lane. From this left lane go straight through two more stoplights (You will leave Route 11 -- which veers off to the right -- at the 2nd stoplight). Continue straight about 1/2 mile to the 3rd stoplight where you will turn left onto North Academy Avenue. North Academy Avenue is the Geisinger Medical Center's entrance road and you will find the Pine Barn Inn located immediately on your left just below the Medical Center.

Lab Automation - Expanding Tools of the Clinical Chemist
Gone are the days when medical lab technicians sat in dimly lit rooms pipetting urine into test tubes. Today, more and more medical technologists sit in brightly lit areas surrounded by the buzz of automated equipment and integrated computer systems. By harnessing this technology, these individuals provide an estimated 60% of parametric information used in medical decision making. Clearly today's automated clinical lab is driving new technology development.

Advanced analytic systems are driving basic instrument design, such as spectrophotometry, to levels never imagined a few years ago. Chromatography applications are evolving into high throughput automated workstations. And the dawning molecular diagnostics industry has products utilizing automated microarray (e.g. 100,000 SNPs on a chip) and microfluidics (e.g. capillary electrophoresis and channel switching in silicon) enabling technicians to examine large portions of the genome and proteome.

At the same time information technology (increasingly available via the internet) is enabling information delivery, archiving and interpretation to a wide base of users. The modern clinical chemistry laboratory integrates all of this diverse technology to support the medical enterprise across large distances 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

Dr. Jay Jones
Director of Chemistry & Toxicology Labs, Point-of-Care Testing Services, and Director of Geisinger Regional Labs

Jay Jones, Ph.D. serves as Geisinger's Director of Chemistry and Toxicology Laboratories, Director of Ancillary Testing as well as its Director of Regional Laboratories. A diplomate with the American Board of Clinical Chemistry (DABCC), Dr. Jones has been with Geisinger for 23 years. He earned his bachelor's degree in microbiology at the University of Maryland and his PhD in biochemistry from George Washington University while employed at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He completed his postdoctoral work in biochemistry at the University of Southern California as well as a fellowship in clinical chemistry at Georgetown University Medical Center. Dr. Jones is a member of several national committees including the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC), liaison for the American National Standards Institute, and Healthcare Informatics Standards Board. He is immediate past chairman for Laboratory Information Systems and Medical Informatics Division (LISMID) and sits on the Program Coordinating Council (PCC) of the AACC.