The ZRT Laboratory Blog

Medical Laboratory Professionals Week (MLPW) is a chance to bring awareness and to spotlight the achievements of medical laboratory professionals, whose work is essential to patient testing and fundamental to overall patient health care. There are 18 national organizations that sponsor MLPW, with approximately 300,000 practitioners of clinical laboratory science in the United States (http://www.ascls.org).

These organizations are dedicated to making a positive impact in health care through leadership that will assure excellence in the practice of laboratory medicine. Many laboratories plan tours and various other activities during this week to educate non-laboratorians about the field of clinical testing.

Quality testing is a vital component of a physician's evaluation of a patient with a view to successful treatment. But how can health care providers ensure that the lab they are working with is giving them the quality they need?

We’re often asked "Why should I partner with your lab? What distinguishes you from the others?" While many providers are expecting the obvious answers like fair prices and fast, reliable results – which are definitely important – we like to dig a bit deeper than this.

At ZRT Laboratory, we think there are six important measures to help determine the quality of a lab.

It may come as a surprise to most people that each year, the last full week of April is dedicated to recognizing and celebrating laboratory professionals.

This year Medical Laboratory Professionals Week falls on April 24-30. Setting aside one week a year to acknowledge these experts is a perfect opportunity to increase public awareness of, and appreciation for, clinical laboratory personnel. 

Just who are these hormone laboratory professionals? They are the skilled individuals whose expertise is vital to laboratory testing. At ZRT, state-of-the-art testing equipment is the norm and each instrument has an experienced specialist or team of specialists at the controls.

I have to admit, I believe that "research" is one of those words that I think is often misused today.

I started my own career in a cancer research lab, continued it in a pharmaceutical company research lab, and then got into medical information research and scientific writing, which meant using a range of medical literature databases and complex searching strategies.

My early research career was back in the days before we had personal computers, so many hours – in between tending to assays and experiments (as well as late in the evening) – were spent thumbing through the pages of massive volumes of Index Medicus, the print version of Medline, in various university libraries to find relevant publications.