Written by
Leah Westover
Vice President, Client Success
When your QA coordinator or senior medical technologist leaves, the documentation doesn't disappear. Your SOPs still exist. Your quality records are still filed. Your corrective actions are still tracked. What does disappear is clarity.
The problem is that those records exist across SharePoint folders, Excel trackers, paper binders, and equipment vendor portals — organized in ways that only made sense to the person who created them.
Six months of competency assessments marked "complete" in one spreadsheet but "pending review" in another.
Open corrective actions with investigation notes that reference hallway conversations.
PT records are split between your LIS and a shared drive accessible by only three people.
Staffing Shortages Are a Workforce Problem — But They’re Also a Systems Problem
Clinical laboratory vacancy rates now exceed 20% nationally, according to ASCP workforce data. The reintroduction of the Medical Laboratory Personnel Shortage Relief Act in 2025 acknowledges this workforce crisis at the federal level, but legislative solutions will take years to rebuild training pipelines.
QA managers preparing for CAP surveys and managing 3,700+ checklist items don’t have years.
They need systems that preserve compliance now, with the staff they have.
From Person-Dependent to Process-Dependent Compliance
The real cost of turnover doesn't show up in vacancy rate statistics.
It shows up when:
- No one knows where the current SOP lives
- Open investigations lack documented context
- Corrective actions can’t be evaluated efficiently
- Inspection prep requires rebuilding the story every time
For labs managing thousands of CAP checklist items across multiple departments, these gaps become citation risks — and nobody wants to explain to their lab director why they got cited for something that was technically documented, but functionally inaccessible.
What Stable Labs Do Differently
Labs that maintain compliance through constant turnover have stopped building systems around individual expertise and started building systems that function regardless of who's on staff.
This doesn't mean replacing skilled lab QA professionals — root cause analysis, CAP requirement interpretation, and quality improvement strategy still require human judgment.
What can be systematized is the administrative infrastructure supporting compliance work — so institutional knowledge lives in the system, not in someone’s head.
At MediaLab by Vastian, we work with QA managers and lab directors, and other lab leaders navigating these transitions. The following approaches have proven effective across hospital labs, reference labs, and specialty testing facilities managing CAP, Joint Commission, and other accrediting or state licensure requirements.
Centralizing Document Control: Making Policies Accessible When Experts Aren't
When a supervisor leaves, your remaining staff shouldn't need to guess which version of an SOP is current, hunt through SharePoint folders for the last approved revision, or interrupt an already overextended colleague to ask where the blood bank quality control log template is stored.
MediaLab by Vastian’s Document Control provides cloud-based centralization with automatic version control. Every policy, procedure, job aid and more lives in a single searchable repository, where staff consistently access the current version. When someone updates a document, the system automatically archives the previous version, maintains a complete change log, and tracks who made modifications and when.
When a survey team asks how a corrective action from a previous visit was addressed in an updated procedure, Document Control allows your QA coordinator to pull up the archived version, show the change log with documented rationale, and present the current procedure with revisions shown — even if they weren't there when the original policy was written. The institutional knowledge would be preserved in the system, not lost with the person who'd originally made the updates.
Automated approval workflows eliminate the manual tracking that typically falls apart during staffing transitions. The system automatically routes documents through review cycles, sends reminders to reviewers when action is needed, and escalates overdue approvals automatically. One lab reported their new document administrator spent 12 hours per week chasing signatures and tracking review status before implementing workflow automation. After implementation? Two hours per week. That's ten hours returned to actual quality work instead of administrative coordination.
Standardizing Quality Event Management: Maintaining Consistency When Teams Are Stretched
A multi-site health system with renowned cancer centers was managing non-conforming events across multiple lab locations using spreadsheets and paper forms. Equipment events and logs were all handled uniquely by each department. When staff left or transferred, the quality coordinators faced constant "paper chases" trying to track down forms, close out monthly reviews, and ensure follow-ups and corrective actions were completed.
The legacy, decentralized system made it nearly impossible to maintain consistency across locations. Each site had slightly different processes, and when experienced staff departed, the institutional knowledge about how to navigate these disparate systems went with them.
MediaLab by Vastian's Intelligent Quality Engine (IQE) addressed this by providing one centralized platform to track and trend non-conforming events, forms, and logs across all lab departments and locations. When a quality event occurs, for example, users complete structured forms that walk them through documentation step-by-step: initial event description with required fields, risk assessment aligned to CAP quality management standards, root cause investigation with built-in prompts, and corrective action planning with clear assignments and due dates.
IQE includes over 400 customizable templates for common laboratory scenarios — ranging from lab-specific NCE and CAPAs to monthly quality indicators reporting to equipment logs, temperature/humidity logs, and more. The health system's lab administrators could configure forms to make certain fields mandatory or optional based on their specific compliance requirements, ensuring that regardless of who's reporting or which location they're at, the investigation captures all necessary information uniformly.
After implementing IQE, the QA coordinators reported having all their data at their fingertips instead of hunting through spreadsheet files across multiple shared drives. Medical directors now receive automated email notifications and can follow up immediately on quality events of high severity. According to their QA Coordinator: "Once I saw IQE, I was sold. The system gets it all in one place. I save time, I track better. I have all of the data I need at my fingertips."
Real-time dashboards provide visibility that doesn't depend on someone manually compiling status reports. Lab directors and QA leaders can see all open events by department, priority, and type, identify overdue corrective actions requiring escalation, spot recurring issues that need systemic intervention, and access time-to-closure metrics for management review — all without compiling and analyzing data manually.
When staff transition out, their successors can access complete event and log histories with full audit trails: who reported each event, what steps were taken, what corrective actions were implemented, and what evidence supported closure. The institutional knowledge is preserved in the system, not lost with departing employees.
How Document Control and IQE Work Together
These platforms function as connected infrastructure. When a quality investigation in IQE reveals a gap in your procedures, the corrective action can link directly to a policy update in Document Control — with the connection documented and traceable for surveyors.
Building for the Reality You're Living In
The Medical Laboratory Personnel Shortage Relief Act represents a critical long-term investment in workforce development. But lab leaders preparing for inspections in the next year need operational strategies that work with current staffing levels.
Labs that thrive amid turnover don’t wait for staffing stability—they build operational resilience that preserves institutional knowledge, even as people change.
If your lab is managing turnover while preparing for CAP, CLIA, Joint Commission or other accrediting or regulatory audits, or if you're ready to move beyond spreadsheets and shared drives that only make sense to the people who built them, we'd welcome the conversation.
Book a demo to see how Document Control and IQE help QA teams maintain compliance during staffing shortages.