Jillian Westover, Laboratory Technician Lead at Spearfish Clinic 10th Street, didn’t even know she had been nominated when she received notice that a colleague had put her up for the American Society of Clinical Pathology (ASCP) Laboratory Superstar award.
It made sense, though, to Jillian’s boss, Jen Robinson, Manager Laboratory for all of Spearfish and Belle Fourche. “In a bigger lab, you have a quality manager, you have a technical manager, you have a lab assistant lead. Jillian is the catchall for a lab our size,” says Jen. “Jillian just continues to bring really good ideas, She’s always looking for process improvement and change-opportunities. She teaches people and leads by example.”
As the only Lead Tech in Spearfish, Jillian oversees about a dozen lab Caregivers. She does a little bit of everything — manages QC or works on scheduling and paperwork. She helps lab assistants draw blood or run blood tests. She also trains all of the new hires and is considered the go-to technical expert for the lab.
Born and raised a Spearfish Spartan, Jillian attended Mitchell Technical College. She then moved back to Spearfish where she initially worked with Monument Health from 2018 to 2021, then left to be a traveling Lab Tech. When she became pregnant with her daughter, Jillian and her husband returned home and resumed work at Monument Health in 2023.
The final Laboratory Superstar votes were tallied last December and Jillian was named one of ten runners-up. She received a certificate and recognition on ASCP’s Facebook page. “It’s great to put on my resume in the long term. And it’s personal that I know that people see what I do every single day,” she says.
It’s a national award and it’s also people’s choice, so her time as a traveler probably helped her out, too, Jen says. Indeed, Jillian confirms that she is still in touch with a lot of her friends from her traveling days, so when they found out she was nominated, they likely cast votes of support.
Yet, it’s not Jillian’s popularity that makes her deserving of such prestigious recognition, it’s the abilities and dedication that she demonstrates every day. For example, she was the first Caregiver in Spearfish to qualify for the Laboratory Technical Professional Development Ladder, a new program at Monument Health that is similar to our Nursing Ladder.
As part of her ladder efforts, Jillian noticed that the organization was sending a lot of Helicobacter pylori tests to Mayo Clinic. She did a cost analysis and concluded that it would be financially beneficial — and more timely — to do those tests in-house. And so, Spearfish’s 10th Street clinic became the only lab within Monument Health that runs H. pylori growth tests. That means that every H. pylori test performed at Monument Health goes through the Spearfish lab.
Another inefficiency Jillian helped to identify: the significance of a price increase in the aliquot lab tubes that the system buys. She brought the issue to Jen’s attention. “We reached out to Laboratory Supervisor Michelle Carroll in Rapid City and she asked Supply Chain to shop around,” says Jen. “They discovered we could order them in a larger quantity for cheaper. So Jillian helped the organization save money on that, too.”
In the future, Jillian plans to sit for the Medical Laboratory Scientist (MLS) certification and perhaps go into leadership to further her already promising career.
Story and Photos by Kory Lanphear