Proposed guidelines for the final review of measurement results in the clinical laboratory

The standard ISO 15189 requires a systematic review of results of clinical laboratory examinations, but it does not provide details on how to carry out such a review. In this article, the Catalan Association of Clinical Laboratory Sciences proposes a guide for this review of patients’ clinical laboratory results pertaining to rational or difference scales (‘quantitative values’). The review process is based on the so-called plausibility control, which may be defined as the set of procedures used to decide if a measurement result is valid or not according to established clinical and biological criteria, considering four variables: (1) alert limits; (2) consistency with the previous result, if any; (3) consistency with other results obtained from the same sample, if any; and (4) consistency with the diagnosis (presumed or confirmed) or, when it is not known, the origin of the request, though these last criteria are generally very weak and the derived decisions may be scantly reliable.