Wednesday 07 June 2023 - 7:05:00 am
Fri 23-03-2018 21:47 PM
ABU DHABI, 23rd March, 2018 (WAM) -- Healthcare experts, who gathered in Abu Dhabi to attend the first American Association for Clinical Chemistry, AACC Middle East Conference, said that laboratory automation has increased the productivity and efficiency of clinical laboratories while highlighting the need for improved communication between physicians and laboratory experts, as well as better quality control.
The conference, which was organised by Al Borg Medical Laboratories from 22nd to 24th March, 2018, brings together clinical laboratory professionals, physicians, research scientists and business leaders from around the world, and features the latest breakthroughs in clinical testing, including mobile health, molecular diagnostics, next-generation sequencing, point of care and automation.
Dr. Joe M. El-Khoury, Assistant Professor of Laboratory Medicine and Co-Director of the Clinical Chemistry Laboratory at Yale University, highlighted the need to maintain the quality management, which will have a lasting impact on clinical decision-making.
"Major advancements in automation and analytical instrumentation have helped reduce laboratory-associated errors over the last decade, but with pre-analytical errors currently accounting for up to 75 percent of all mistakes, it still represents the leading cause of error in laboratory medicine. Laboratory professionals must focus on what is happening outside of the laboratory," he said.
He added that "Quality Indicators," QI, can measure how well the laboratory meets the needs and requirements of users and the quality of its operational processes, including the pre-analytical phases of testing. Adopting QIs to track and improve performance is essential, as the laboratory cannot improve what it does not measure, he further added.
Dr. Lamia Mansour, Professor of Clinical and Chemical Pathology at the Faculty of Medicine of Cairo University, called for better communication between physicians and laboratory experts and added that clinical laboratories are an integral part of the healthcare system, as they play a key role in patient management and are vital to clinical decision-making.
"Laboratory test results usually include a reference interval or a threshold cut-off based on clinical guidelines. The interpretation of such results is, however, no easy task, and poses a challenge to both physicians and laboratory professionals. To properly interpret laboratory test results, valuable knowledge known by the laboratory needs to be communicated to physicians," she said.
Dr. Nikola Baumann, Co-Director of the Central Clinical Laboratory and Central Processing at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, stressed the need to detect and respond to laboratory errors.
"The overall error rates in laboratories for correcting analytical results are usually less than 1 percent. Errors in many laboratories are even 0.1 percent or less. But we must be cautious because laboratories need to detect these errors. If the quality control frequency and the levels of quality control are appropriate, errors can be detected as early as possible," she said Dr. Ola Elgaddar, Associate Professor at Alexandria University and Medical Director of the Al Borg Medical Laboratories, discussed the harmonisation of laboratory tests and highlighted the international trials and efforts to standardise overall testing processes.
