By Erin Lamson, Grace Cottage Lab Technician
Have you ever visited a lab for blood tests and wondered what happens to your specimen? If you have, you’re not alone. Lab testing happens behind closed doors for obvious safety reasons, leaving the clinical laboratory nearly invisible to the public eye. As a result, clinical lab professionals have one of the least understood roles in health care, even though a recent estimate suggests there are roughly 300,000 laboratory professionals in the United States.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) claim over 7 billion clinical lab tests are performed annually in the U.S. Tests range from relatively simple ones like finger-stick glucose tests, to highly complex ones requiring special expertise, such as molecular diagnostics. Most tests are considered moderately complex, including common tests like cholesterol levels. Regardless of complexity, test results provide helpful, sometimes critical information to healthcare providers and their patients.
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