Highlights from Color’s annual Genetic Counseling Onsite

Color has always placed a high value on genetic counselors (GCs) and the services they provide, as evident by the fact that every Color test includes genetic counseling sessions and support. Here at Color, we are fortunate to have an extremely experienced and well-rounded team of GCs who dedicate their careers to improving the lives of our customers and supporting the medical community.

While some of our GCs are based in Color’s Bay Area office, others live and work remotely in various parts of the U.S. and Canada. For a couple of days each year, the entire Color GC team unites in person at the Color offices to share knowledge, review and set goals to improve upon our practices and enhance our team relationship. This year, with a larger team than ever, we focused on gaining insight from other Color teams, brainstormed how we can work together to build upon our high quality and efficient genetic counseling services and reflected upon our personality traits that impact individual working style and team dynamic.

A few examples of some highlights from the agenda:

• Color’s talented Head of Product and User Experience, Wendy McKennon, met with the GC team to share her insights into how Color as a whole and the GC team can improve patient experience and compliance to cancer and other screenings in 2019.
• We gained insight into how Color’s reports systems are created and improved upon daily from our dedicated Engineering manager, Emily Johnston, and Product Manager, James Liu.
• As GCs, we often place high value and focus on serving others and leave very little time calibrating our own mental health. To counteract this, our own lovely GC, Lily Servias, led us in an introspective meditation and self-care workshop that left each us feeling more serene and balanced.

All in all, we gathered, we enjoyed a beautiful San Francisco sunset, we ate, we learned, we gained a better understanding of ourselves and other Color teams, and we are more motivated than ever to enhance ourselves so that we can serve our customers and improve upon healthcare practices to the best of our abilities.

Kelly Tangney is a licensed and certified genetic counselor at Color Genomics based remotely in Southern California. Before joining as Color’s first remote genetic counselor, she worked at the Veterans Administration (VA) Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, University of California Los Angeles and Kaiser Permanente Woodland Hills providing clinical genetic counseling to a diverse adult populations. She has presented a research poster at the National Society of Genetic Counselors meeting and is published in the Journal of Cancer Education and the Journal of Genetic Counseling.