Lessons from External Quality Control in Laboratory Medicine: Important Implications for Public Health!

Data on the general impact of the quality of laboratory testing on public health and patient care are scarce despite the fact that billons of tests worth trillions of dollars are performed each year around the world both, in the medical inpatient and outpatient sector.

This remains true also because medical testing remains largely underregulated in many parts of the world and most internal quality control materials are provided by the manufacturers themselves, and the majority of medical tests have not been evaluated further concerning their validity by sound clinical studies.

This is why external quality control measures including round robin trials and external quality control surveys are so important in assessing the quality of modern assays.

Moreover, better insight is needed into the many areas of in vitro diagnostics and into the cornucopia of problems with test quality in the different areas of laboratory medicine, and the impact of such problems on medical care and the public health sector.

This Research Topic is focused on possible lessons to be learned from the continuous work of INSTAND, e.V., Duesseldorf, an independent scientific society, devoted to the complex field of external quality control in laboratory medicine over the past 20 years. This includes, but is not limited to, the areas of regulatory issues in molecular diagnostics, and external quality control in connection with the identification of diagnostic and therapeutic tools for clinical use. As such, this article collection aims to accumulate better knowledge on the ongoing problems and pitfalls with insufficiently evaluated test systems and the possible impact of such problems on medical care and public health. Findings from the different studies included in this special issue will pave the way for a better understanding related to the impact of test quality on patient care on the individual level and at large, to help improving future medical care and high quality patient management.

Keywords: public health, laboratory medicine, external quality control, economic modelling, quality of care

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.