Clinicians are an important part of the overall healthcare picture and laboratories ensure that clinical needs are met. Hence, laboratory leaders will benefit from the implementation of strategies to managing the clinician-laboratory relationship and improving patient care together.

One part of gaining clinician satisfaction is providing them with the services they require in a timely fashion. As such, our lab has developed a system whereby we immediately and proactively notify clinicians of abnormal results as they come in. In addition to this proactive notification, we would suggest reflex testing based on the results. Continuous quality improvement projects such as this can greatly advance patient care and could have an important impact on outcomes if they are designed with the needs of clinicians in mind.

It is the clinician who sends a patient to the laboratory, so it is natural to consider the doctor as our main client. But I believe it is the patient who is the laboratory’s true client.

Buy-in from clinicians is certainly needed. We share a common client and a common goal. To achieve this, we must be in constant conversation with clinicians to ensure we work together effectively. Proactively providing advice to the clinicians will enable them to start seeing the laboratory as a resource, a knowledge hub, and a true partner.

A patient-centric laboratory knows that behind each sample or test tube is a person—someone’s mother, father, sibling, child or friend. Whether it is confirming a long-awaited diagnosis, determining eligibility for a new treatment, or providing updates on the progression of disease, everything we do ultimately contributes to the patient’s overall health journey. Every patient is important, and our true clients need to have confidence that the lab will test their samples with quality, accuracy and empathy.

Reminding lab professionals to be patient-centric

As in many labs, I encourage my team to work with a sense of empathy for the patients behind the samples and to let that empathy guide their work. The following are some suggestions for incorporating these principles into laboratory practice:

• Incorporate reminders of patient-centricity as an integral part of new employee onboarding
• Remind all staff that being patient-centric and understanding patients as the true client may require extra work at times
• Create a task-force within the lab whose mission is to identify innovative ways to improve clinician-lab relationships in ways that have a positive impact on patient outcomes

So, who is the lab’s true client? Of course, it is the patient. However, efforts to work more harmoniously with clinicians, to provide faster and better quality results, to communicate effectively, and to develop quality improvement projects that improve services to patients, will allow both the laboratory and the clinician to reach their common goal of providing optimal patient care.