When point-of-care coordinator Edwina Szelag’s director was reviewing her performance, he asked her what he could do to make her job more challenging. She laughed and said, “Not a thing.”

“Each day I walk in with a game plan, and as the day unfolds, the plan doesn’t happen,” says the POC coordinator for Health First, an integrated delivery system on Florida’s Space Coast. “There is no boredom in this position. Sometimes you have to blaze your own trails in terms of finding a solution to a situation that’s unique to point-of-care testing, and I enjoy the challenge of doing that.” POC coordinators everywhere have blazed trails and still are doing so. Today, many years after point-of-care testing took off, strong programs are in place and setting examples for others. The American Association for Clinical Chemistry considers Szelag’s POC program one of them: Its Critical and POC Testing Division named her 2006 Point-of-Care Coordinator of the Year for her outstanding achievements in the POC field. She received the award last month at the AACC annual meeting in Chicago.

“A big part of my job is making sure everything is working everywhere, every day, but it takes the whole point-of-care testing team to make that happen,” says Szelag, who views POC testing as “running a virtual laboratory outside of the walls of the laboratory itself.”