Patient groups, clinicians and healthcare professionals agree - all test results need to be seen, understood and followed up.

Background Diagnostic testing provides integral information for the prevention, diagnosis, treatment and management of disease. Inadequate test result reporting and follow-up is a major risk to patient safety. Factors contributing to failure to follow-up test results include unclear delineation of responsibility about who is meant to act on a test result; poor coordination across different levels of care; and the absence of integrated health information systems for the efficient information communication.

Report formatting in laboratory medicine - a call for harmony.

The results of medical laboratory testing are only useful if they lead to appropriate actions by medical practitioners and/or patients. An underappreciated component of the medical testing process is the transfer of the information from the laboratory report into the reader's brain. The format of laboratory reports can be determined by the testing laboratory, which may issue a formatted report, or by electronic systems receiving information from laboratories and controlling the report format.

Delivering safe and effective test-result communication, management and follow-up: a mixed-methods study protocol.

Introduction: The failure to follow-up pathology and medical imaging test results poses patient-safety risks which threaten the effectiveness, quality and safety of patient care. The objective of this project is to: (1) improve the effectiveness and safety of test-result management through the establishment of clear governance processes of communication, responsibility and accountability; (2) harness health information technology (IT) to inform and monitor test-result management; (3) enhance the contribution of consumers to the establishment of safe and effective test-result management systems.

Methods And Analysis: This convergent mixed-methods project triangulates three multistage studies at seven adult hospitals and one paediatric hospital in Australia.

Recommendations for reporting and flagging of reference limits on pathology reports.

Surveys by the RCPA PITUS Project have shown significant variations in report rendering between Australasian Pathology Providers. The same project collected anecdotal evidence that this variation has led to the misunderstanding and misreading of results - a clinical safety issue. Recommendations are given for the rendering of reference limits on pathology reports, determination and rendering of result flags, and the documentation of sub-population partitions for reference intervals.

Standardisation of test requesting and reporting for the electronic health record.

This paper is a review of the standardisation required to achieve interoperability for pathology test requesting and reporting. Interoperability is the ability of two parties, either human or machine, to exchange data or information in a manner that preserves shared meaning. This is needed to make healthcare safer, more efficient and more effective.

The history of pathology informatics: A global perspective.

Pathology informatics has evolved to varying levels around the world. The history of pathology informatics in different countries is a tale with many dimensions. At first glance, it is the familiar story of individuals solving problems that arise in their clinical practice to enhance efficiency, better manage (e.

Introduction into PPPM as a new paradigm of public health service: an integrative view.

In the present state of healthcare, usual medical care is generally given to the already diseased person, while the key link-personal health monitoring underlain by predictive, preventive, and personalised medicine (PPPM) techniques that are being intensively elaborated worldwide-is simply missing. It is this link, based on the recognition of subclinical conditions, prediction, and further preventive measures, that is capable of regulating morbidity and diminishing the rates of disability among able-bodied population, thus significantly cutting the traditionally high costs of treating the already diseased people. To achieve the above-mentioned goal-the elaboration of the PPPM concept and its practical implementation-it is necessary to create a fundamentally new strategy based upon the subclinical recognition of the signs-bioindicators of cryptic abnormalities long before the disease clinically manifests itself.

Annealing of silica to reduce the concentration of isolated silanols and peak tailing in reverse phase liquid chromatography.

Non-porous, colloidal silica particles were annealed at three different temperatures, 800, 900 and 1050 °C. The adsorption of lysozyme, a probe of surface roughness, was consistent with progressively reduced surface roughness as temperature increased. The heat treated silica particles were rehydroxylated and then used to pack UHPLC columns.

Sintered silica colloidal crystals with fully hydroxylated surfaces.

Silica colloidal crystals require multiple processing steps before they are useful materials in analytical applications, such as chemical separations, microarrays, sensors, and total internal reflection microscopy. These chemical processing steps include calcination, sintering, surface rehydroxylation, and chemical modification, but these steps have not been fully characterized for colloidal crystals. Silica particles of nominally 200 nm in diameter were prepared, and FTIR, SEM, UV-visible spectroscopy, and refractive index measurements were used to study the changes in chemical composition, particle size, and particle density throughout the process.

Single-molecule probing of adsorption and diffusion on silica surfaces.

Single-molecule spectroscopy has emerged as a valuable tool in probing kinetics and dynamic equilibria in adsorption because advances in instrumentation and technology have enabled researchers to obtain high signal-to-noise ratios for common dyes at room temperature. Single-molecule spectroscopy was applied to the study of an important problem in chromatography: peak broadening and asymmetry in the chromatograms of pharmaceuticals, peptides, and proteins. Using DiI, a cationic dye that exhibits the same problematic chromatographic behavior, investigators showed that the adsorption sites that cause chromatographic problems are located at defects on the silica crystal surface.

Probing topography and tailing for commercial stationary phases using AFM, FT-IR, and HPLC.

Atomic force microscopy was used to study surface characteristics of three chromatographic silica products: Agilent Zorbax SB300, Waters Symmetry 300, and Merck Chromolith. Each is modified with a monomeric C18 monolayer. Both topographic and adhesive force measurements were made for each product.

High-speed electroseparations inside silica colloidal crystals.

Crystals made from 200 nm silica colloids are hardened and chemically modified with chlorodimethyloctadecylsilane for use in electrically driven, reversed-phase separations. A van Deemter plot reveals extremely narrow peak widths for the separation of a cationic hydrophobic dye, DiI, with both the A and C terms 10-fold smaller than those for a conventional HPLC column. Electrically driven separations are demonstrated to be achieved in less than 10 s for three dyes differing in hydrophobicity and also for three peptides differing in electrophoretic mobility.