The goal of clinical laboratories is to produce accurate information for clinical decision
making in medicine. More than half of the medical decisions made depend on clinical laboratory
tests. Patient safety represents an important and critical problem for laboratories. They need
to assure that the information they deliver to physicians is accurate and therefore safe for
clinicians to use. Endogenous compounds can interfere with laboratory tests decreasing
accuracy and threatening patient safety. Elevated bilirubin (bilirubinemia) and elevated lipids
(lipemia) are common conditions that cause significant interferences with laboratory results.
Clinicians depend on laboratories to detect these endogenous interferences. Laboratories must
have a means to detect these endogenous interferences make decisions about reporting results
and evaluate their impact. Most clinical pathology books provide only an abbreviated
introduction to the subject or provide a long list of references without the necessary
foundation for evaluating their significance. Package inserts typically provide scant
information. This book provides the empirical and theoretical foundation for these
interferences describes the clinical settings where they occur and explains their evaluation
and detection allowing the laboratory to interpret the available data on interferences and
make the appropriate decision to effectively report test results while protecting patient
safety.
