The following is a copy of an article from Evidence-Based Practice, 2007; 10(12):1-2. Venous thromboembolism refers to a spectrum of disease that includes both pulmonary embolus and deep-venous thrombosis (DVT). More than 250,000 people in the United States are diagnosed annually with venous thromboembolic disease;...

When a new D-dimer method is to be implemented either as a substitute for a currently used D-dimer assay or as a supplement, maybe as a point-of-care assay, it is necessary to do a clinical comparison of the "old" assay versus the "new" assay. The major pitfalls in D-dimer comparisons are addressed in this paper.   ...

Reprinted with permission from British Journal of Nursing, 2004, Vol 13, No 9.  Arterial puncture is the most common method used to obtain a sample for the measurement of arterial blood gases (ABGs) and is essential to guide the prescription of long-term oxygen therapy (LTOT) in patients with chronic hypoxic lung...

External Quality Assessment (EQA) in medical laboratories have evolved over the past 50 years to provide more sophisticated systems compared with the simple participants’ analytical performance evaluation of earlier years.  There are clear distinctions between the proficiency testing schemes and the evolved External...

With the increasing number of blood tests performed at the point of care (POC), it has become more and more important to perform method comparison studies, comparing new methods to the existing methods used in the laboratory (LAB). This is done primarily to ensure that uniform results are reported throughout the...

60 % of all neonates develop jaundice during their first week of life and thereby run a risk of getting hyperbilirubinemia.  Although different approaches for establishing treatment criteria have been suggested, treatment of neonatal hyperbilirubinemia is usually still based on the measurement of total bilirubin...