CAP TODAY Pathology/Laboratory Medicine/Laboratory Management
The CAP has 30 official liaisons to various organizations who attend scientific meetings or designate others to do so. They report to the Standards Committee, which reports to the Council on Scientific Affairs. We periodically publish bits of what the CAP’s outbound liaisons hear and see in their liaison roles.
Christopher M. Lehman, MD
William J. Castellani, MD
Cordelia E. Sever, MD
March 2020—Quantifying the uncertainty of the laboratory measurements that we report to clinicians is an important quality tool and can assist clinicians in interpreting results. In particular, evaluating patient results over time (longitudinal observation) requires determining whether a result is truly different from a previous result or whether the difference could be attributable to measurement uncertainty. Traditionally, chemistry laboratories have calculated various levels of assay imprecision (within lab, total) to satisfy CLIA validation/verification requirements and to monitor assay quality. These imprecision calculations serve as estimates of measurement uncertainty (MU). Estimation of MU outside the chemistry laboratory (hematology, immunology, microbiology) is not as common.