Jane Hermansen

My name is Jane Hermansen. I'm the director of network and outreach development for the laboratories of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. In my role, I work with hospitals across the country to expand their outpatient laboratory testing into their own communities. The pandemic gave us the opportunity to step up to the plate and deliver necessary laboratory services.

The laboratory prior to the pandemic had been a box that healthcare services came out of. Once we were able to rise to the needs of the pandemic, we became partners in caring for our patients.

Communication was incredibly important, and where we found we started, we were dealing in crisis management mode.

There were daily changes, there was so much ambiguity, and we found the need for increased communication with all levels of our organization. And as a result, leadership became much more engaged and visible. During the pandemic, we were also desperate to learn what others were doing. The Center for Disease Control, CDC, had weekly calls for labs across the country. Professional associations, actually like CLMA, the Clinical Lab Management Association held weekly and every other week town hall meetings for people to engage on mutual topics of interest.

Supply chains for the laboratory are a critical partnership because the laboratory uses a lot of stuff. During the pandemic because not every supplier was able to meet every laboratory need, the supply chain needed to help the laboratories establish, new, and expanded relationships. That meant going off of their preferred vendor lists and using others.

So the pandemic really forced their hands, and we needed to make sure that we were able to secure all of the supplies that were necessary. And we were able to identify that our vendors were not vendors. They were more partners in our healthcare delivery process.

The laboratory relationships with the supplier community are incredibly important. Through the pandemic, the supplier community became even more critical. Unfortunately, the suppliers weren't always able to provide exactly the product that the laboratory needed. So each member of that partnership, the laboratory, and the suppliers needed to be able to collaborate and be a little bit flexible in some of their requests, and also in what they were able to deliver to their customers.

All of these shifts are going to impact the laboratory so positively. Number one, having a different relationship with executive leadership across the organization is going to support the laboratory, especially when they have to deliver new and more valuable clinical services.

They're going to have the support from leadership to make the necessary investments and expand into the right service lines to support the medical needs of their community. That's one positive. The other positive is that we've learned from each other, we've learned to share with each other, and we realized we don't need to compete. We're all here to serve patients.

And that's given us the opportunity to elevate together the service and the care that we provide. And lastly, considering the relationships that we have with our supplier community, they're not vendors, they're partners, and we can't do this work without them. Looking to the future, clinical laboratories really need to take into account the challenges that we're facing today.

Number one, we are facing an unprecedented staffing shortage across the country and across the world. Laboratory professionals. We need to make sure that we have roles for them that are challenging, and that we're recruiting and retaining talented scientists to perform our testing. Number two, we have reimbursement and financial challenges. So we need to make sure that the testing that we're providing is affordable and is the most cost-effective. And lastly, we need to make sure that we have a patient engagement process. Patients are consumers of healthcare. They're very engaged in their own care, so we need to make sure that our laboratory services are affordable, they're accessible, and our data can be easily used by patients to help manage their own care processes.

Today, laboratories are addressing the professional and personnel shortage in a variety of ways. Automated platforms are helping technologists work to the top of their degrees. So instead of having laboratory technologists perform manual processes, automation makes them work more efficiently and makes them more productive.

We also find process design is coming into play substantially in the laboratory, driving out waste, removing redundant processes, and making sure that every employee's work is value-added, driving toward the delivery of the product. And lastly, stewardship is incredibly important. Ordering and performing the right test on the right patient at the right time and in the right location and not doing unnecessary tests.

All those three things are driving toward helping laboratories address the shortage in staffing. Throughout the pandemic, laboratories were able to rise to the challenge and meet testing needs. Now that we've taken our victory lap, what's next? We need to realize that those COVID volumes aren't something that you can count on for the future. We hope that we don't have to count on them in the future.

So what do we need to do? Let's make sure our laboratories are poised. We have an eye on the market. We're looking to see what the physicians and even the consumers are needing and demanding for testing. And then also being able to be flexible and nimble, and making sure that we can flex our platforms, and our test menus, and make sure that the services that we're providing today are meeting the needs of the market tomorrow.

And then lastly, keeping an eye on future developments in technology and aligning our laboratories to meet the future needs of our providers and our patients.