The Physician and the Laboratory

Although the overall quality of clinical laboratories continues to improve, new quality issues are emerging as clinicians and their laboratories become progressively estranged. In a recent study of diagnostic errors involving internists, many errors were identified that involved issues at the interface of the clinician and the laboratory. Five cases are presented as illustrations of preanalytical, analytical, and postanalytical errors of this type. Improving patient safety will require that clinical laboratories and clinicians develop ways of working together to analyze and address these problems.