3 Questions With Nancy Alers, MS, MT(ASCP)CM, CQIA (ASQ), CLC (AMT), CQM/OE (ASQ)

When I began my career, we did not have the same access to social media, professional networking, and information that we have today. Through greater connection and visibility, laboratory professionals can now see the many different paths available within the field. You can work in an academic medical center, a public health laboratory, a reference laboratory, education, research, regulatory compliance, quality, industry, management, or leadership.

I have also been surprised by how much a person can evolve within the profession. I began as a laboratory aide in the Navy while completing my education. I then became a medical laboratory technician and later a medical laboratory scientist. From there, I transitioned into regulatory compliance, quality, management, and leadership.

Advancements in laboratory medicine are especially exciting to me because I have had the opportunity to witness how dramatically the field has evolved over the past 25 years.

Early in my career, our pending list was printed each night on an old data printer. It produced a long paper report, and we had to sit down and check every accession number individually to make sure that no specimen or result had been missed. It was a very manual process.

Today, laboratories have automation, real-time pending lists, dashboards, color-coded alerts, specimen-tracking systems, and tools that provide much greater visibility into the testing process. We can identify delays and potential problems more quickly, improve workflow, and reduce the risk of something being overlooked.

Looking ahead, I am inspired by the continued growth of laboratory automation, informatics, artificial intelligence, digital pathology, and more sophisticated specimen logistics and tracking. I recently wrote about the future of laboratory quality and how these technologies can help us move from reacting to problems after they occur to identifying risks earlier and preventing errors.

It is exciting to know where we started, to see how much progress has occurred over the last quarter century, and to imagine what laboratory medicine will be capable of next. I believe the future is very bright, particularly when technology is used thoughtfully to support laboratory professionals and improve the quality and safety of patient care.

Although I no longer perform testing at the bench, my favorite area was always microbiology. I felt a special connection to bacteriology because it often felt like detective work. Every organism presented clues, and there was always a story to uncover through the colony morphology, biochemical reactions, and clinical context.