The assessment of interpretation in clinical biochemistry: a personal view.

In many laboratories, clinical biochemists add interpretative comments to laboratory reports. There is, however, little evidence base to support this activity. Interpretative comments attached to reports are quite complex, usually consisting of several components that may suggest possible diagnoses and additional tests.

Provision of interpretative comments on biochemical report forms.

Providing interpretative comments on reports, particularly those for primary care physicians is an important part of our job. Few clinical biochemists (whether medical or scientific) receive significant training for this. Most work in isolation, and few receive feedback on the utility of their comments.

Experience with assessing the quality of comments on clinical biochemistry reports.

We assess a previously described scoring system for the appropriateness of interpretative comments on clinical biochemistry reports over 21 distributed cases and over a group of 41 UK-based participants. The distributed cases covered a range of clinical scenarios and included pre- and post-analytical problems. The UK-based participants had all registered an interest in using this case participation for their continuing professional development; all had higher professional qualifications in clinical biochemistry, and the group included participants based in teaching hospitals and district general hospitals as well as those with a medical or a scientific background.