Health care delivery is no longer a simple process
of examining the patient and giving him a prescription. Over the years there
has been rapid expansion in the various and giving of health care services. As
part of this expansion process and explosion of scientific medical knowledge,
it is hard to underestimate the importance of clinical laboratory test results.
Nearly 80% of physicians’ medical decisions are based on information provided
by laboratory reports. A test result by itself is of little value unless it is
reported with the appropriate information for its interpretation.
Typically,
this information is provided in the form of a reference interval (RI) or
medical decision limit. The concept of reference interval was introduced by
International Federation of Clinical Chemistry (IFCC) to avoid the problemswith normal values and values obtained from an individual under clinical
investigations. According to IFCC, it is necessary for every laboratory to have
its own set of reference limits An RI as defined by Ceriotti “is an interval that,
when applied to the population serviced by the laboratory correctly includes
most of the subjects with characteristics similar to the reference group and
excludes the others”. No RI is completely right or wrong. The majority of
RIs in use today refer to the central 95% of the reference population of
subjects.
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