On the Move

A few months ago I bumped into a pulmonologist in the doctor's lounge I enjoy chatting with. She likes to travel, and I enjoy hearing about her latest trip - I like travel too and would much rather sock new car or house or clothes or jewelry money away and spend it all on traveling. As we were finishing up the conversation she cocked her head, looked at me straight in the eye with a slight smile on her face, and said, "I am so jealous of you pathologists. You get to stay put at your microscope. Do all your work at the same hospital. We are running around all day."

I was so shocked I didn't answer her, but as I walked away I thought "What a false impression she has of us!" We run around from hospital to hospital, covering different ORs and radiology rooms in shifts. Maybe not in one day, but certainly up to a fourth or more of the month. Increasingly, outpatient clinics are putting in histology labs, necessitating more travel to do cases - this can demand travel to two or three different places in one day. Furthermore, we dole out lab directorship amongst ourselves, covering the many different labs we service in our overall domain.  This requires weekly or monthly travel to fulfill clinical pathology duties, which are more and more demanding every year with increasing regulations and education requirements. As our designated lab inspector, I travel to different hospitals around the state and outside of it with teams of expert lab technicians as part of our duty to regulatory agencies that certify us as an "approved" laboratory, meaning we hold up to the scrupulous demands that we require of the labs we inspect in return.

This means that I know how to use many different EMR systems and up to four different sign out programs - some of which are hospital based and some of which are internet based. I can access my home computer remotely to juggle work couriered in from different hospitals in attempt to even out the workload amongst all of us, as it changes daily (I do not envy the math that the gross room has to coordinate daily based on workloads at multiple different hospitals and different clinics!). Yes, I am grateful that I am more of an information-gathering voyeur than an interactive participant in the EMR system, for the most part - we do write notes on fine needle aspirates we perform, as well as apheresis procedures. But I think we make up for this on the back end with our individual dictation and report release software. It's ever evolving and more and more confusing as the years progress.

The days of the hospital-based pathologist sitting (hiding) in the office behind a microscope are over, for better or for worse. We are on the move, my dear travel pulmonologist friend - someday I will explain.  In the meantime, envy me with your wrong impression and I will continue to envy your world travels. I'm starting to catch up. Conference in Hawaii in February and Spring Break ski trip last week to Colorado. I'll break the borders as the kids get older. In the meantime, I'm busy enough traveling for work.