Introduction

Extract

No one disputes that healthcare costs are increasing dramatically. At the same time, quality and value of healthcare services are being called into question. More and more, the attention of medical laboratory professions (MLP) is being directed toward assessment of quality of clinical laboratory information as correlated with patient outcomes, clinical decision-making, and cost. Emerging is the concept of “value-based healthcare” in which information regarding quality of services is made accessible to consumers, who generate demand for these products and services. Producers compete to increase the value of services which is defined as quality of patient outcomes relative to the cost. ^1,2 For laboratory medicine (LM), the distillate of these developments is that the value of our services will be evaluated by how well they support positive medical outcomes and the extent to which they favorably influence medical decision-making.

The first question is: Can we as medical laboratory professionals, demonstrate the value of our services and information unequivocally, in data-driven terms, in language understood by the emerging value-based healthcare system providers and consumers? During this decade, there has been increasing focus on the lack of evidence-based laboratory medicine (EBLM) practices and guidelines published or benchmarked.³ EBLM tenets are developing as the methodology required to establish and evaluate LM effectiveness and to standardize best practices to achieve efficiency and measure effectiveness. As in much of medicine, in general, LM diagnosis and treatment rules developed through expert consensus opinion are, currently, the basis of medical decision-making. EBLM promises to provide data on…