Utilization management in the core laboratory.

The need for appropriate utilization management of diagnostic testing is increasingly important. The majority of laboratory tests are performed in highly automated core laboratories that combine chemistry, immunoassays, hematology, coagulation and esoteric assays. These core laboratories are designed for high throughput leveraging economies of scale to produce large numbers of test results relatively inexpensively. Most core laboratory tests can be categorized based on whether they should or should not be ordered at all and, if so, by the frequency with which test ordering is reasonably appropriate (e.g. unrestricted, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or once in a lifetime). Classifying tests by this approach facilitates electronic rule-based logic to detect which tests are appropriate for a given clinical indication.