Whether you are new to the leadership ranks in your laboratory or a long-serving director closer to the end of a career than the beginning, my guess is that you have a story to tell. As with any profession (editors included), laboratorians communicate with each other in a special language and tend to be passionate about similar things. Scientists and researchers at heart, the essence of laboratory medicine is discovery—of the known and unknown. Among the many lessons to be taken from the COVID-19 pandemic is that dedication to diagnostic discoveries through a honed lens can yield truly amazing results. In a year in which “PPE” and “PCR” became household terms, it is clear that clinical laboratory leaders have much to offer in educating each other, and the health care realm at large.

Experience is an excellent teacher, but there also is great value in seeing a situation through fresh eyes. Detailing improvement projects in the laboratory from numerous angles is the primary goal at MedicalLab Management, and we cannot do that without your input. If you have taken part in a presentation or professional poster detailing a process improvement, you have already done 80% of the work needed to share that story with your colleagues.

It may flabbergast you to know that you do not need to be a polished writer to contribute to MLM. Our job as editors is to help shape and form the content you provide. Even if you have just a germ of an idea, we are here to nurture that idea, and help you help each other. I, for one, miss the in-person collegiality of professional meetings, trade shows, and conferences, as they have always been excellent sources of material for articles. As we emerge from the fugue-state of COVID-19, we hope you will seek to share your lessons learned, including process improvement projects outside of the COVID arena.

For details on how to publish with MLM, visit medlabmag.com/publish-with-us. Here we provide the basic guidelines for working with and publishing with us. We encourage all ideas and we do not expect fully finished pieces. Likewise, we all benefit from learning from both successes and failures. To paraphrase a favorite quote from William Faulkner—all of us have failed to match our dream of perfection, thus I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

Feel free to reach out directly to me at . I look forward to it.

With kind regards,

David McCormick

Managing Editor