Leading up to Lab Week: Recognizing the Role of Laboratory Professionals

- This is Lab Medicine Rounds, a curated podcast for physicians, laboratory professionals and students. I'm your host, Justin Kreuter, a transfusion medicine pathologist and assistant professor of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at Mayo Clinic. This episode, we're really kind of continuing this celebration of celebrating the laboratory. And so I wonder if we could kind of get into this by kicking off with, you know, from your perspective,

why is it important to highlight the presence of the laboratory in current medical practice? Dr. Hsi: I mean, it's always a good time to sort of remind people that the laboratory, you know, is, is there to provide, you know, services for our patients. I think the number bandied about that, you know, 70% of all, you know, medical information comes from the laboratory.

And so, you know, we have a major role in providing data, actionable information to our clinical colleagues to make patient care and treatment decisions. And so with such an important role, it doesn't help, you know, hurt to get in front of people and raise that awareness again, that we, we are a part of the care team.

- I mean, when you say it's providing 70% of the information, that's pretty substantial, but then also to talk about, it's a reminder, I guess it's, it's easy to kind of be always counted on to be providing these results in a timely fashion. - Oh, certainly. And I think, you know, I, well, COVID was a huge example of getting lab front and center, and it certainly raised awareness.

And at other institutions I've been, you know, the awareness that, you know, at some point in time, the laboratory touches pretty much every single patient in their journey. And there's not a lot of specialties that can say that, right? So one of my colleagues here says, you know, we are involved in healthcare from cradle to grave, and that actually is to some degree true.

- And so for, for the listener who maybe hasn't thought about the role of the laboratory in their practice, what would be your advice for how to kind of approach building that bridge maybe more explicitly in their practice? I think maybe some clinician listeners may not understand where to start. - Yeah. I would say, you know, please reach out, contact us. We don't bite.

We love, in fact, I'm part of our, you know, pathologists oftentimes are introverted and, you know, we need to be brought up, but we are always happy to consult and, you know, lend our expertise. You know, we become integral parts of the care team. I think that's one area that we, as a field, our next big push is to become a little more integrated and front and center in the care team.

You know, having pathologists get out and speak to patients is another avenue that is really satisfying because patients are also curious about laboratory testing and their particular results. And so that's another, you know, way that pathologists may not have not traditionally been involved in part of the care team. But that's certainly was a very fulfilling exercise for me. Other pathologists actually are involved with that.

Transfusion medicine people deal with, you know, more directly with patients and things like that. So I think, you know, as we as a field develop, you know, our next frontier is really to get a little more front and center in the care teams. - Where is the laboratory headed? If you could elaborate a little bit for us - As, as we move forward in information.

'cause I think at the end of the day, yes, we're doing all these testing, our laboratories are generating, like we said, you know, a large chunk of the information being used to treat patients. But at the end of the day, it's information, right? And so how do we leverage that information in new ways to add to, you know, the, the diagnostic decisions? - What do you think is, might be our biggest challenge with that step forward into more of those that clinic domain?

- Yeah. Well I think it's, you know, part of it is, you know, workforce and kind of like keeping people interested in going into the field. You and I both know, it's getting harder and harder to find people that get into the field because, you know, there's so many things people could be doing and how do we make sure that people understand there's this super interesting career path that is contributing to health of the population, and you know, how do we keep those people interested?

And then how do we continue to develop the skill sets that we need in terms of, you know, information management and computational pathology, which is kind of the new buzzword, right? And build those skill sets into the training program so that we can continue to grow as a specialty. I think those are things that we will be trying to figure out over the next coming, you know, decade.

- You know, why is it important from your perspective for us to look at our past when planning for our future? Dr. Hanson: That's a great question. I think that one of the first things that comes to mind is it's an opportunity to re-look at and validate what our principles are. Too often we just keep going down the path. We're busy, you know, we do today, you go to today's list and you do today's list and you worry about yesterday's things you didn't get done.

And we don't take the time to really sit back and reflect on what's my vision? What are my principles, am I upholding those? Are they still valid? Do they still work for us? How can I incorporate them more into what we do? And I think by looking back, you can really go, have I been consistent over time? Have we been consistent over time with why we do what we do? And I think that's really something we don't spend a lot of time thinking about, but that really should drive what we do.

It certainly should drive our decision making and our planning and our prioritization of things. - How do you see these aspects that you're celebrating, informing kind of the future, you know, kind of the future projections as success in our, in our field? - I think we really, we need to move beyond some of our historical approaches to things and really kind of grab that discipline of change and really drive it in the laboratory and challenge how we do things.

- How do we shift from service orientation to really being colleagues, you know, equals with our other, you know, healthcare professionals. That's really going to, one, help us to be able to advocate for best laboratory practice to support the clinical practice, but also certainly make us more visible as well. - We need to always think of ourselves that we are every bit as involved with and responsible for and taking care of our patients. And I think that's a, that's an important mindset.

A lot of these things are the mindsets I think that we need to really work on as a, as a profession.

- What do you wish for the future of laboratory medicine and pathology?