Point-of-Care Laboratory Testing Provides Reliable Results

Decreasing laboratory test turnaround time is a way to improve the timeliness of care. In most emergency departments, point-of-care testing is much faster than traditional laboratory testing. In a retrospective study, researchers compared more than 11,000 paired samples that were analyzed within 1 hour of each other by point-of-care blood gas analyzers (Radiometer ABL 700 and 800 analyzers) and traditional laboratory analyzers (Advia 2400 Clinical Chemistry analyzers [Siemens Medical Diagnostics]) at three British hospitals over a 5-year period. Both adult and pediatric arterial and venous samples were analyzed.

Agreement between laboratory and blood gas point-of-care results was high for sodium (Pearson's linear correlation coefficient, 0.9…