How to Avoid Building an Airplane Mid Flight: Lab Medicine in the Face of Emerging Public Health Crises

Course overview

The year 2020 will go down as one of the most difficult, trying, and socially polarizing years in modern history because of the global pandemic of COVID-19. Nearly every facet of life on earth faced disruptive and dynamic challenges that pushed operational processes to the brink of collapse in different ways. Laboratory medicine is no exception to this disruption and learned a great deal from these experiences. Though COVID-19 was exceptional, should the laboratory community, especially the clinical microbiology lab, have been more nimble and able to respond to such an emerging challenge? Were 2016 Zika, 2014 Ebola, 2012 MERS CoV, and 2009 nH1N1 not enough of a practice schedule for the big game? In 2022, human monkeypox virus further exposed the fact that clinical laboratories, including public health and federal agencies, had made improvements but were still unable to adequately respond. The clinical lab is at a turning point of being reactive versus proactive. This presentation will focus on strategies and approaches to consider for making your laboratory proactive to respond to the next emerging pathogen or reemerging infectious disease. Learning Objectives: Review the recent history of emerging/reemerging pathogens and challenges faced by laboratories; Describe the challenges of resolving differences in federal regulatory processes for test development compared to traditional clinical laboratory processes for assay development; Identify key stakeholders and important communication strategies for improved response and workflows for responding to emerging and/or reemerging pathogens.