From MD Anderson’s workforce pillars to NYU Langone’s digital pathology overhaul, the 2026 Executive War College speaker spotlight highlights the “boots-on-the-ground” experts set to reveal how labs can navigate reimbursement pressure and regulatory shifts this April in New Orleans.
As clinical laboratories face a “perfect storm” of reimbursement pressure, workforce shortages, and shifting regulatory mandates, the upcoming Executive War College on Diagnostics, Clinical Laboratory, and Pathology Management (April 28-29, 2026) has released its first wave of speaker spotlights. The 2026 agenda will focus on “early-adopter” case studies that demonstrate how labs can stop merely keeping pace to instead set new standards in innovation.
Speaker Highlights: Driving Financial and Operational Resilience
Among the key thought leaders taking the podium are experts focused on the high-stakes intersection of clinical quality, workforce stability, and bottom-line profitability.
Walter McAndrew, MB(ASCP), SSGB, molecular diagnostics laboratory manager at MD Anderson Cancer Center
McAndrew will detail a high-impact case study on workforce stability. In an era of rampant burnout and reliance on expensive traveler staff, McAndrew will demonstrate how MD Anderson re-engineered its molecular operations to better drive measurable quality while simultaneously reducing costs.
Jonathan Burgart, director of US marketing at Abbott Core Diagnostics
Burgart is set to challenge the “cost-center mindset” that plagues many hospital-based laboratories. His session will provide a strategic framework for hospital executives to use excess capacity and operational data to improve operating margins and net income.
Christina Olesnycky and Syed T. Hoda, MD, NYU Langone Health
Leading the shift toward high-volume automation, the two speakers will share the roadmap NYU Langone used to achieve a full digital pathology workflow in just one year. Their presentation will highlight how pathology at scale accelerates diagnosis and provides a necessary foundation for AI-enabled innovation.
Stefanie Davidson, laboratory director at Foundation Health
Davidson will share proven workforce strategies that help laboratories break their dependency on temporary staffing and achieve long-term operational stability.
Executive War College 2025. Photo credit: EWC
Why It Matters for Lab Leaders
The 2026 program arrives at a critical strategic tipping point as laboratories move from a period of regulatory uncertainty into a year of mandatory execution. With the expiration of legislative moratoriums on PAMA reporting and the shift toward a post-LDT ruling reality, the margin for operational error has effectively disappeared. This year’s sessions move beyond high-level theory to address the hurdles of 2026: navigating the “regulatory cliff,” defending shrinking margins against a surge in federal audit activity, and transitioning AI and digital pathology from expensive pilot projects into essential, everyday workflows.
“The laboratory has the potential to reframe its role in the healthcare system,” noted Burgart, emphasizing that this year’s sessions will provide the specific financial and operational blueprints required to turn regulatory challenges into a sustainable competitive advantage.
About the Event
The 31st Annual Executive War College will be held at the Hyatt Regency New Orleans. It remains the largest gathering of lab and pathology leaders focused exclusively on the business and management of diagnostic medicine.
This article was created with the assistance of Generative AI and has undergone editorial review before publishing.
New funding will help Vitestro expand clinical validation, scale manufacturing, and prepare its autonomous blood-draw technology for broader hospital and laboratory adoption.
Vitestro has secured $70 million in oversubscribed Series B financing to accelerate development and commercialization of its Aletta Autonomous Robotic Phlebotomy Device (ARPD), a platform designed to automate routine blood collection in clinical settings.
In March 2025, The Dark Reportreported on Vitestro’s development of the ARPD—one of the last manual steps in the laboratory testing workflow. The company had recently received CE mark approval in Europe and reported clinical trial results showing a 95% first-stick success rate and strong patient acceptance, positioning the technology as a potential solution to phlebotomy staffing shortages and pre-analytical variability in clinical laboratories.
For clinical laboratory leaders facing persistent staffing shortages and rising specimen volumes, the investment highlights growing industry interest in automating one of healthcare’s most common clinical procedures.
“Closing our Series B financing reflects strong conviction in our mission to establish a new standard in autonomous robotic venous access and diagnostic blood collection,” said Toon Overbeeke, chief executive officer and co-founder of Vitestro. “Diagnostic blood collection remains the highest-volume invasive medical procedure globally, with billions of procedures performed annually.” (Photo credit: Vitestro)
Vitestro plans to use the capital to advance the next generation of its Aletta platform, conduct additional clinical studies, and scale manufacturing as the company prepares for broader commercial rollout in Europe and eventual entry into the United States through the FDA’s de novo regulatory pathway.
The Aletta system combines multimodal imaging, robotics, and artificial intelligence to autonomously identify veins, guide needle insertion, and collect blood samples with high precision. The platform is designed to perform routine diagnostic blood draws, potentially helping laboratories standardize collection quality while reducing human-dependent variability.
For laboratory executives, the technology could offer a new strategy to stabilize phlebotomy operations as workforce shortages persist. By automating routine blood draws, robotic platforms like Aletta may allow organizations to improve workflow predictability, support existing staff, and maintain patient throughput in high-volume outpatient settings.
A forthcoming issue of The Dark Report will feature interviews with Vitestro executives and provide deeper analysis of what autonomous robotic phlebotomy could mean for clinical laboratories, including its potential impact on staffing, workflow efficiency, and specimen quality.
UW Medicine and Seattle Children’s launch long-read sequencing research to uncover genetic factors, setting new standards for pediatric genomic testing.
The study represents a critical step in both research and clinical laboratory practice. Applying long-read sequencing as a first-tier assay can streamline workflows, particularly when working with challenging samples such as post-mortem tissue or dried blood spots. Laboratories involved will need to combine advanced sequencing with robust bioinformatics pipelines, accurate variant interpretation, and integration of parental genomes to provide clinically relevant results.
The study, led by Danny E. Miller, MD, PhD, assistant professor of pediatrics and laboratory medicine and pathology at the University of Washington, and Alexandra Keefe, MD, PhD, assistant professor of pediatrics at UW Medicine, will sequence 200 family trios—a child and their parents—aiming to uncover genetic factors that may contribute to these sudden, unexplained deaths.
PacBio’s Revio system with SPRQ-Nx chemistry will be used to generate highly accurate long-read genomes, allowing researchers to detect complex structural variants and tandem repeats that traditional sequencing may miss. By including parental data, the team hopes to distinguish inherited variants from spontaneous mutations, increasing the likelihood of actionable findings for families.
Long-Read Sequencing Advances SUDC Investigations
“Selecting HiFi sequencing as our first-line whole-genome assay allows us to search for answers with the accuracy and breadth these families deserve,” said Miller. “By starting with long reads and incorporating parental data, we can resolve difficult variants, phase them accurately, and provide guidance relevant to SUDC.”
The SUDC Foundation currently assists over 1,000 families in more than 20 countries. The organization emphasizes the importance of comprehensive investigations for sudden child deaths, including genetic testing, DNA banking, and family screening when appropriate.
“Families affected by SUDC face unimaginable loss,” said Julia Burgess, president of the SUDC Foundation. “Funding this project reflects our commitment to advancing research that brings clarity, guidance, and hope to grieving families nationwide.”
Beyond supporting families, the research could establish a model for how cutting-edge genomic testing is incorporated into clinical investigations of sudden childhood deaths. The team plans to implement a tiered genomic approach for cases with suspected genetic causes, beginning with trio-based exome and low-pass whole-genome sequencing, followed by reflexive long-read sequencing when necessary.
“This project has the potential not only to provide answers to families but also to transform standards for genetic investigation in pediatric sudden death,” said Keefe. “It highlights the essential role laboratories play in turning advanced genomic technologies into actionable clinical knowledge.” (Photo credit: UW Medicine)
The SUDC Foundation expects the study, funded at $328,133 over four years, to generate data that supports broader adoption of long-read sequencing in pediatric genomics and enhance understanding of the genetic underpinnings of SUDC.
For clinical laboratory professionals, this initiative underscores the growing expectation that advanced genomic technologies—particularly long-read whole-genome sequencing and trio analysis—will play a larger role in investigating unexplained pediatric deaths. As these tools move toward first-line use, labs must be prepared to support complex variant detection, robust bioinformatics interpretation, and collaboration with clinicians and medical examiners, positioning the laboratory at the center of efforts to deliver clearer answers for families.
New digital assessment helps lab leaders identify systemic safety gaps before serious injuries and fatalities occur.
Dark Daily’s sister publication, Lab Manager, recently reported that the National Safety Council (NSC) has launched a new digital assessment tool designed to help laboratories identify systemic safety weaknesses before they lead to serious injuries and fatalities—high-consequence events that can carry significant human and financial costs.
Called the Organization Safety Gap Analysis Tool, the platform adapts NSC’s evidence-based SIF Prevention Model into an interactive, structured evaluation tailored to complex work environments such as clinical laboratories. The initiative was developed through NSC’s Work to Zero program in partnership with the NCCCO Foundation.
For clinical laboratories that already operate on tight staffing models, the NSC tool may help identify areas for investment that will keep workers safer.
Moving Beyond Compliance to Prevent High-Severity Laboratory Incidents
Serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs) are rare but catastrophic events that result in life-altering harm or death. In laboratory settings, they can arise from chemical exposures, fires, equipment malfunctions, uncontrolled energy releases, or containment failures. Unlike minor injuries, SIFs typically emerge from organizational and system-level breakdowns rather than a single unsafe act—making them difficult to detect through conventional safety audits.
Traditional compliance reviews often focus on lagging indicators such as recordable injury rates and incident counts. While those metrics remain important, they do not necessarily reveal whether safety systems are strong enough to prevent high-severity events. The new SIF prevention tool shifts the emphasis from counting past incidents to evaluating whether leadership practices, hazard identification processes, and control systems are capable of preventing catastrophic outcomes.
The digital assessment can be completed in approximately 10 to 15 minutes. Laboratory leaders respond to a series of statements using a color-coded scoring system—green for full compliance, yellow for partial compliance, and red for limited or no evidence of compliance. The platform then generates a customized summary highlighting strengths, identifying safety gaps, and offering targeted recommendations aligned with best practices.
The tool evaluates performance across seven core elements that NSC identifies as critical to preventing serious injuries and fatalities: the safety and health operating environment; management leadership; worker engagement; hazard identification and prioritization; hazard abatement and control; implementation and operation; and continuous improvement.
High-Severity Risk is a Business Risk
Together, these elements are designed to uncover systemic vulnerabilities that may not surface during routine inspections or regulatory compliance reviews.
For laboratories, the business implications extend well beyond worker safety. Clinical labs routinely handle volatile chemicals, compressed gases, biological agents, cryogenic systems, and high-energy equipment. While most facilities meet baseline regulatory requirements, catastrophic incidents often occur when multiple small failures align—failures that may go unnoticed without a structured, system-level evaluation.
A single serious event can result in operational shutdowns, regulatory scrutiny, liability exposure, reputational damage, and increased insurance costs. As accrediting bodies and regulators place greater emphasis on high-severity risk prevention, laboratory leaders are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that their safety programs are proactive, data-driven, and capable of controlling enterprise-level risk.
By benchmarking safety maturity and pinpointing gaps in leadership alignment, hazard prioritization, and control effectiveness, the SIF prevention tool offers laboratory managers a framework for more strategic decision-making. Results can inform investments in engineering controls, workforce training, operational safeguards, and internal audit processes.
As laboratory environments grow more complex and regulatory expectations continue to evolve, industry observers note that organizations can no longer rely solely on compliance-based approaches. Systematic prevention of high-consequence events is becoming a core component of sustainable laboratory operations—and a critical safeguard for both people and business continuity.
The association urges stronger regulations and data standards to keep AI safe and fair in clinical laboratories.
The Association for Diagnostics & Laboratory Medicine (ADLM) is calling on Congress and federal regulators to modernize laboratory oversight as artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more embedded in clinical testing, warning that without updated safeguards, AI tools could put patients—particularly those from historically marginalized groups—at risk.
In a recently released position statement, ADLM cautions that while AI has the potential to improve diagnostic accuracy, streamline laboratory workflows, and strengthen data-driven decision-making, poorly governed systems could amplify bias and undermine patient safety. For laboratory professionals evaluating or deploying AI-enabled tools, the message is clear: Oversight, validation, and data integrity must keep pace with innovation.
Bias Risks Drive Push to Update CLIA and Standardize AI Oversight in Clinical Labs
AI models are only as reliable as the data used to train them, the organization noted. When systems are built on limited, inconsistent, or historically skewed datasets, they may replicate societal inequities. In healthcare, that can translate into underestimating disease risk or misclassifying conditions in racial and ethnic minorities, older adults, and underserved populations. Because many AI health tools rely on historical datasets that underrepresent certain groups, laboratories could unknowingly implement algorithms that perform unevenly across patient demographics.
To address those risks, ADLM is urging federal policymakers to explicitly incorporate AI systems into existing laboratory regulations, including updates to the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA). The group also recommends that federal health agencies work with professional societies to convene laboratory medicine and informatics experts to establish consensus guidelines for validating and verifying AI tools used in test interpretation and clinical decision support.
As reported on in 2025 by The Dark Report, the call comes in the wake of the federal government’s decision last year to eliminate the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Advisory Committee (CLIAC), a key advisory body to CMS and CDC that could have served as a natural forum for advancing ADLM’s proposed updates to CLIA to address artificial intelligence oversight.
Clinical Labs Push for Data Standards and Clear AI Accountability
In addition, ADLM is calling for expanded federal efforts to harmonize laboratory test results and standardize data reporting. Foundational steps, the organization argues, for reducing variability that can compromise algorithm performance. The statement also presses AI developers to increase data diversity, minimize bias in training datasets, and ensure laboratories have access to the technical information needed to independently evaluate algorithm performance.
“Clinical laboratories are uniquely positioned to help develop and assess the integration of AI health tools into testing workflows and, most importantly, how they influence patient test results and health outcomes,” said ADLM President Paul J. Jannetto, PhD.
Jannetto added, “We therefore urge the federal government to draw on the expertise of laboratory medicine professionals in order to develop AI regulations that support innovation, as well as transparent, consistent performance monitoring of this potentially revolutionary technology.” (Photo credit: ADLM)
For lab executives and medical directors, the position statement reinforces a growing reality: AI governance is quickly becoming a core operational and compliance issue. As adoption accelerates, laboratories may face heightened expectations from regulators, payers, and health system partners to demonstrate that AI-driven tools are analytically sound, clinically validated, and equitable across patient populations.
A new KFF Health Tracking Poll shows healthcare costs are now the top economic worry for U.S. households—raising concerns that patients may skip screenings or shop more aggressively for lab tests, reshaping utilization and revenue patterns in 2026.
Healthcare costs are now the top economic concern for US households—and that anxiety is likely to ripple directly into clinical laboratories, according to a new KFF Health Tracking Poll released January 29.
Roughly one-third of the public (32%) say they are “very worried” about their ability to afford healthcare, a higher share than those most concerned about food, housing, utilities, or transportation. More broadly, 56% expect healthcare to become less affordable for their families in the coming year, signaling sustained pressure on patients’ willingness and ability to engage with the health system.
For clinical laboratories, that concern translates into two distinct, and potentially competing, patient behaviors.
Rising Costs Could Reshape Patient Testing Behavior
In one scenario, patients worried about out-of-pocket costs may delay or skip preventive screenings and fail to follow through on physician-ordered diagnostic testing. KFF found that about one in five respondents said their healthcare costs have risen faster than basic necessities like utilities or groceries. That perception alone can be enough to discourage patients from completing tests they view as optional, even when those tests are clinically indicated.
In another scenario, cost-conscious patients may still pursue testing but do so more selectively. Rather than abandoning care altogether, these patients may “shop around,” comparing prices, turnaround times, and service offerings across clinical laboratories. This trend could increase demand for clearer test pricing, stronger patient-facing communication, and more transparent billing practices—areas where some labs may find both challenges and opportunities.
The poll also suggests that cost concerns are not confined to any single demographic or political group. Healthcare costs ranked as the top economic worry among Democrats, independents, and Republicans alike. More than four in ten voters (44%) say healthcare costs will have a “major impact” on whether they vote in the upcoming midterm elections, underscoring how personally felt the issue has become.
Policy Shifts Add New Pressure to Coverage and Affordability
Recent policy changes may be amplifying these anxieties. Congress allowed enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits to expire, a move that two-thirds of the public (67%) say was “the wrong thing” to do. The expiration is expected to increase premium payments for many marketplace enrollees, potentially leaving patients with less discretionary income for lab testing and other medical services.
While most Americans still view the ACA favorably—58% overall—that support has softened since last fall, reflecting ongoing uncertainty about coverage stability and affordability. For labs, fluctuations in insurance coverage can complicate reimbursement, increase patient self-pay balances, and add friction to pre-test counseling and billing workflows.
Taken together, the findings point to a year in which clinical laboratories may see uneven test utilization patterns. Some patients may disappear from the testing pipeline altogether, while others arrive armed with questions about cost, necessity, and alternatives.
As financial anxiety increasingly shapes patient decision-making, labs that can clearly communicate value—clinical relevance, quality, speed, and cost transparency—may be better positioned to maintain trust and test volume in an environment where affordability is front of mind.
