This award is funded by Lifescan, Inc. and includes a cash award and funds to support attendance at the the Association for Diagnostics & Laboratory Medicine (formerly AACC) Annual Meeting. The recipient, Kimberly Skala, is from Advocate Christ Medical Center and Hope Children’s Hospital.
Congratulations on behalf of the Awards Committee.
Kim Skala
Kim Skala began her career at Advocate Christ Medical Center in 1981. Advocate Healthcare includes 10 acute care hospitals and 2 children’s hospitals and is recognized as one of the nation’s top 10 health systems. Kim has been involved with POCT since 1998. The program at her site has grown to 20 POC tests and approximately 2700 operators. Kim is involved with numerous multidisciplinary teams including the Culture of Safety Program, Diabetes Management Task Force, Performance Improvement and the Advocate System-wide Patient Identification Team.
As part of ACL Laboratories--a joint venture between Advocate (IL) Healthcare and Aurora (WI) Healthcare--she co-chairs the ACL POCT Technical Advisory Team and is involved in system standardization across multiple test platforms and information systems working to meet the diverse needs of caregivers and patients across two states and 22 hospitals.
Kim has been an active member of the Tri-State POC Network since its inception in 2001. She is a speaker on POCT for CLS students and current laboratory professionals. Kim was a presenter at the the Association for Diagnostics & Laboratory Medicine (ADLM) Annual Meeting in Chicago (2009) for the POCC Forum and has contributed articles to several professional publications. At the 2010 ADLM International Point of Care Symposium in Boston she presented an abstract on reduction of patient identification errors.