Pharmacy & lab
Point-of-Care Testing
Testing done beside the patient rather than in the laboratory — glucometers, rapid kits, bedside analysers.
- Category
- Pharmacy & lab
Point-of-care testing produces a result where the patient is: a glucometer at the bedside, a rapid antigen kit in casualty, a blood-gas analyser in the ICU. The gain is time; the trade is that the test happens outside the laboratory's quality system unless someone deliberately extends that system to cover it.
Why it matters in a hospital
A point-of-care result is a clinical result and gets acted on like one, so it carries the same duty of care as a laboratory result while typically having less around it — no accessioning, often no recorded quality control, sometimes no permanent record at all beyond a number written on a chart. The failure mode is not a wrong reading but an untraceable one: a value acted on that nobody can later locate, attribute or verify. Deciding which point-of-care results become part of the record, and how, is the whole of the problem.
How Trisvio handles it
Trisvio records point-of-care values entered manually as observations against the patient, with who entered them and when. They do not pass through specimen accessioning or the two-stage verification that laboratory results do, and the record shows that difference rather than presenting both the same way.
Related
Related terms
- Reference RangeThe band of values considered normal for an analyte, which varies by age and sex — and, for newborns, by age in days rather than years.Read definition →
- TAT (Turnaround Time)The time from a laboratory test being ordered — or the sample collected — to the verified result being available to the clinician.Read definition →
- Accession NumberThe unique identifier given to a specimen when the laboratory receives it, distinct from the patient number and the order number.Read definition →
- Vital SignsBasic clinical measurements — temperature, pulse, blood pressure, respiratory rate and SpO₂ — of body function.Read definition →