Our Second 40 Years

Those of you who attended the 2008 Leadership Conference and Workshop in Baltimore know what a wonderful event it was! Subcommittee meetings followed the workshop on three provocative and timely topics: methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) surveillance, newborn screening for biochemical disease, and quality control in noninstrumented point-of-care testing. Many of the attendees at the conference stayed to help subcommittees create the corresponding guidelines that will be published later this year.

CLSI is all about participation. Forty years ago, our founders created a forum where in vitro diagnostic (IVD) device manufacturers, laboratory professionals, and government agencies could come together and work through difficult issues. Forty years ago, we were a small group with a US focus. Today, CLSI is a vibrant organization of thousands of volunteers, 27 full-time employees, a multimillion dollar budget, and an active library of over 180 monographs.

As we take that first step into our second 40 years, we embark down a road whose end we cannot see. We need a beacon to guide us, to keep us headed in the right direction no matter where that road might turn or how many forks into byways there might be. Let us set the face of a patient as our beacon: The face of a woman who has just received a cancer diagnosis. The face of a diabetic worried about his blood sugar. The face of an expectant mother as her blood is collected for prenatal testing. The drawn face of a patient whose infection demands the right antibiotic. The face of a young child in a tropical, open-air clinic.

Every patient expects all laboratory testing to be right. The results might make the difference between good health and debilitation. Of course, that patient has no idea that thousands of people have labored over the years to ensure his doctor will have timely, authentic, reliable laboratory results. He knows nothing of evaluation protocols, antimicrobial susceptibility breakpoints, imprecision curves, connectivity, or matrix effects. He only knows he is sick and wants to get better.

The blue books of CLSI are powerful medicine. Patient safety depends upon standardization of manufacturing and laboratory processes and sound quality systems. Whether our perspective is from an industrial desk, a government office, or a hospital laboratory, if we keep that face before us, everything we do will be for the right motivation. That is why you and I volunteer for CLSI: to keep the healthy well and to care for the sick. We can make the dreams of CLSI volunteers of the first 40 years reality, by concentrating on the needs of patients.

Gerry Hoeltge [ return to top ]