Douglas Moeller, MD

Virtually everyone in the clinical laboratory business is now acquainted with Z-code identifiers. Each unique laboratory test should have a unique tracking code, even if more than one Z-code identifier is reported with a corresponding American Medical Association's Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) billing code.

Nobody disputes the need for careful, judicious diagnostic testing. But as the number of individual gene tests continues to grow, clinicians are struggling to keep up. On the one hand, using diagnostic markers like KRAS in colon cancer or hormone receptor status in breast cancer to select the most appropriate chemotherapy regimen is essential.

Although we've known for decades that heredity is a major factor in cancer susceptibility and management, the insights gained in the past decade are still breathtaking.