Best Practices in Laboratory Medicine

Links:

Identifying Best Practices in Laboratory Medicine -- a Battelle Project for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

On this site, you’ll find information about three separate but closely related efforts that are part of a national initiative to improve the quality of clinical laboratory practice led by the Division of Laboratory Systems in CDC’s National Center for Preparedness, Detection, and Control of Infectious Diseases (NCPDCID).

Laboratory Medicine and the Health Care System

Practices that reduce laboratory-related error rates or optimize use of laboratory testing can have a substantial effect on patient safety, clinical decision making about treatments and interventions, health outcomes, and costs. (more…)

What's Here

Under its contract with CDC, Battelle is responsible for three parts of CDC’s laboratory quality initiative:

A report on the current status of laboratory medicine in the United States, which provides a detailed overview of the key factors affecting the field laboratory medicine today and those that will shape the field in the coming decades.
- To read a brief description of the report click here: Laboratory Medicine - A National Status Report, 2007
- To read the complete report, visit: Laboratory Medicine - A National Status Report, 2007
Development of methods to identify and evaluate evidence-based Best Practices in Laboratory Medicine.
- For more information about the findings of the Phase I of the project and a summary of current work, click Best Practices in Laboratory Medicine
- To read the complete report on Phase I, click here: Laboratory Medicine Best Practices: Developing an Evidence-Based Review and Evaluation Process
A review of the effectiveness of proficiency testing (PT) for meeting regulatory, educational, and quality improvement objectives of the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 (CLIA ′88).
- For a summary of the report of the Technical Working Group on Proficiency Testing, click: Report of the Work Group on Proficiency Testing

Improving Quality in Laboratory Medicine—A CDC Initiative
CDC’s Division of Laboratory Systems (DLS) is spearheading a national initiative to improve the quality of laboratory practices. The initiative has three major goals:
	Improve patient safety and health care outcomes by improving the use of laboratory testing in diagnosis, monitoring, and management of disease
	Reduce redundancy and waste in laboratory services
	Provide tools that laboratories can use to improve quality of service to clinicians and patients
For more information about the full range of CDC’s efforts to improve quality in laboratory medicine, visit the DLS website.

Battelle conducts the project described on this website for the Centers for Disease Control under contract W911NF-07-D-0001/DO 0191/TCN 07235