Laboratory professionals must be given detailed clinical information to make decisions on the most effective testing for patients, writes Martin Wilkinson, as we can no longer afford for laboratories to be confined to the back office.
Laboratories across the world still work largely in isolation to clinical providers. Even today, in the digital age of sharing information, a large majority of laboratory professionals are not given the full clinical perspective on the very patients they are carrying out tests for, which is something that must change with urgency.
Diagnostic functions working within and alongside our health services need to be given clinical context and access to wider sets of information, so that laboratory professionals can make active and effective decisions on testing, and not just rely on inadequate and even sketchy requests from clinical colleagues in different care settings.
It is time to move the laboratory out of the back office, to become a core element of clinical delivery.
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