Volume 40 Number 4 | August 2026
Summary
Medical laboratory professionals play a critical role in patient care by ensuring test results are reliable, meaningful, and appropriately used. This article urges laboratorians to move beyond “test performers” and become consultative partners through clearer communication, diagnostic stewardship, and real-time advocacy that helps clinicians understand test limitations, specimen issues, and result interpretation.
Darby Naheedy, DO, MLS(ASCP)CM, Patient Safety and Diagnostic Stewardship Committee Past Chair
Brooks K. Kennedy, MLS(ASCP)CM, Patient Safety and Diagnostic Stewardship Committee Vice Chair
Laboratory professionals do not diagnose disease or make treatment decisions; those responsibilities belong to the clinician. Our responsibility is different, but just as critical: we produce the objective health data that informs most clinical decision-making. Before a result becomes part of a patient’s clinical picture, the laboratory determines whether it is technically sound, analytically valid, and reliable enough to be trusted.
Despite this impact, our specialized expertise often remains unknown to the broader healthcare team. True professional advocacy requires us to bridge this gap, actively shifting our mindset from “test performers” to recognized consultative partners.
Two Domains, One Goal
The line between laboratory and clinical responsibilities can feel blurry because laboratory results become clinical tools. Clinicians own the clinical picture; their focus is the patient’s story, exam, diagnosis, and treatment plan. Laboratory professionals own the test. Our focus is on knowing when a specimen is acceptable, when a method has limitations, and when a test may not answer the clinical question being pursued. That is exactly why the laboratory’s role cannot be reduced to simply producing numbers.
In a hierarchical, multi-functional healthcare environment, it is easy for laboratory professionals to feel they lack the authority to question an order or offer unsolicited explanations. We often mistake advocating for the integrity of the test as overstepping into the physician’s lane. However, understanding this boundary explicitly permits us to speak up in our domain.
Advising that a specific molecular panel will not detect a suspected pathogen or explaining why an analytical interference renders a value clinically useless is not practicing medicine; it is practicing medical laboratory science. When the issue is the test—its specimen, method, reliability, or appropriate use—we are not stepping outside our role. We are practicing within it.
“Advising that a specific molecular panel will not detect a suspected pathogen or explaining why an analytical interference renders a value clinically useless is not practicing medicine; it is practicing medical laboratory science.”
Stepping up from the Bench
Advocacy starts at the bench because this is where laboratory expertise first becomes visible to the healthcare team. Consider a routine specimen rejection. To the laboratory, the reason may be obvious: the sample is hemolyzed, mislabeled, or collected improperly. But to the clinician with a sick patient, an unexplained cancellation can feel less like quality assurance and more like a barrier to care.
A rejection or cancellation should not end with a code in the chart that leaves the care team frustrated. It should include the analytical why. Why was the specimen unacceptable? What made the result unreliable? Is there a limitation the team needs to understand before moving forward? For these questions, a concise yet well-explained cancellation can significantly save time and continuity of care.
When a bench professional picks up the phone to explain that a potassium value is falsely elevated due to hemolysis, or when the professional investigates an unexpected delta check before releasing a result, they are doing more than simply securing a redraw. They are providing real-time clinical decision support. This proactive communication demonstrates that the laboratory actively correlates data rather than just passively generating it.
Every interaction with a care team member is a chance to make our specialized knowledge visible and useful. A correction or rejection should be explained in a way that turns a moment of clinical friction into a moment of laboratory consultation.
Complexity and Stewardship
Modern medicine is becoming more dependent on laboratory-generated data, not less. Nowhere is this clearer than in molecular testing. A clinician may know a specific mutation is associated with targeted therapy, but they may not know which assay should be ordered, what level of detection is required, or how differences between platforms affect reliability. With the rollout of rapid metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS), comprehensive molecular panels, and multi-omics, the sheer volume of diagnostic data risks outpacing the clinical team’s capacity to account for it.
The same challenge exists in our information systems. As results move across electronic health records and patient portals, a value may travel farther and faster than the method, reference interval, analytical limitations, or interpretive comment that should accompany it. In this increasingly complex and technical environment, the laboratory professional is the ultimate guardian of diagnostic integrity.
This is why the rise of the Doctor of Clinical Laboratory Science (DCLS) matters. The DCLS makes visible what has always been true: laboratory expertise does not end when a result is released. It has value wherever tests are selected, results are interpreted, workflows are designed, and diagnostic decisions are supported. But this responsibility does not belong to one degree alone. MLSs, MLTs, specialists, pathologists, and DCLSs all have a role in protecting the integrity and appropriate use of laboratory testing.
On this frontier, testing is more complex, laboratory data are moving faster, and clinical teams are being asked to make decisions in an increasingly crowded information environment. Now is the time for laboratory professionals to step into this role with clarity of purpose and confident voices. When we speak up about test selection, methodology, limitations, result reliability, and appropriate use, we advance diagnostic stewardship and patient safety. We become not just producers of results, but stewards of the information those results become, and the decisions they inform.
Building a Reliable Bridge
Claiming our domain cannot remain a mindset. It must become behavior. It must show up in the meeting where test menus are built, the phone call where a cancellation is explained, the QI project where rejection patterns are traced, and the workflow discussion where ordering practices are changed. This behavior in action can look like the following:
- Join Cross-Functional Teams: Participate in institutional committees where test utilization, ordering workflows, specimen collection, result reporting, and patient safety decisions are made.
- Engage in Interprofessional Rounds: Attend workshops, huddles, or rounds where laboratory professionals can explain test capabilities, limitations, specimen requirements, and result interpretation considerations in real clinical workflows.
- Lead Quality Improvement (QI): Design laboratory-led QI projects, such as test utilization reviews, specimen rejection analyses, or result-reporting improvements, that show how laboratory expertise can reduce waste, prevent errors, and support patient care.
- Speak up in Real Time: Communicate when specimen quality, methodology, interference, turnaround time, or test limitations may affect how a result is used.
Conclusion: Advocacy as a Feedback Loop
Professional advocacy, at its core, means intentional inter-team engagement. The testing lifecycle, from order and collection to analysis and interpretation, is not a straight line. It is a dynamic cycle with multiple branching points, each representing an opportunity for the laboratory to provide explanation, feedback, and educational intervention to clinical teams.
Advocacy is a two-way street. Intentional engagement creates mutual, interprofessional information exchange: When “the lab” and “the floor” engage in productive, efficiency-improving, back-and-forth conversations, a positive feedback loop is created. These educational exchanges can improve inter-team relations, reduce errors in collection and transport, clarify turnaround-time expectations, and support the safer use of laboratory results.
Laboratorians should never shy away from a clinical conversation when the issue involves the test. Taking the time to explain a methodology, clarify an interference, or advise on test selection is the kind of work that constitutes peak day-to-day advocacy.
This is not about waiting to be understood. The onus is ours to make our expertise clear, useful, and present where laboratory decisions affect patient care. Through these intentional interactions, we ensure the laboratory is no longer a hidden data factory, but a beacon of clinical clarity where everyone learns, the system improves, and the patients win.
Brooks Kennedy is Clinical Cellular Therapy Quality Assurance Specialist IV at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Department of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapy in Houston, Texas.
Darby Naheedy is Resident Physician, Anatomic and Clinical Pathology | PG-1 at the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington, Vermont.