Renee Krake headed to Texas after her college graduation in Michigan 40 years ago and has never looked back.

Equipped with a bachelor’s degree in medical technology, Ms. Krake quickly got a job as a Medical Technologist testing patient samples at the former St. Paul University Hospital and has remained with UT Southwestern ever since.

She is now Supervisor over three labs located at William P. Clements Jr. University Hospital – Zale Lipshy Pavilion, the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center, and UT Southwestern Medical Center at Richardson/Plano.  

“I really enjoy the job here,” she says. “The lab is pretty much like a family. We all have to work together to get things done.”

When she started, almost everything in the lab was done by hand, Ms. Krake recalls. Orders for lab work came in on paper; technicians like her performed the tests and wrote the results by hand; then someone from the lab had to physically deliver the paper results to nursing units and put them in the charts.

Now, she says, “most everything is done electronically.” Lab equipment scans the labels on patient samples to determine what test needs to be done, performs the test, and automatically records the results in the patient’s electronic medical record.

Ms. Krake sees all of this as a good thing. The automation cuts down on errors: “There are all kinds of checks and balances,” she says. The machines’ work allows lab technologists to spend their time checking for unexpected results and potential errors.

Rather than being threatened by all the changes, Ms. Krake says the steady innovation has made her work more stimulating. “It’s always changing – always something new,” she says.

She also likes the variety of the work performed at UT Southwestern. “There’s always opportunity to do more challenging things within the lab because of all the different areas that we have,” she says.

All this has been positive for an employee like Ms. Krake, who describes herself as committed and inquisitive.

“She is extremely dedicated to UTSW,” says her supervisor, Mohammed Ahmed, Manager of Core Laboratories. “She always looks for solutions and is very diligent in her work.”