Linking analytic performance goals to medical outcome.

As laboratorians relate analytic performance to medical goals, they face complex choices among competing subjective and objective criteria for the assessment of acceptable analytic error. Defining desirable performance as some fraction of physiologic variability provides potentially excessive benchmarks for quality. More important than the recognition of health are the clinical decisions which deal with diseases, particularly the latters' degrees of severity and the different medical actions these prompt. It is equally essential to take into account the reasoning by which physicians arrive at these decisions, since their mental processes condition desirable performance goals. Considering these modalities, a universal model of analytic performance requirements uniformly applicable to all measured parameters clearly cannot be devised. Rather, tolerance limits for analytic error must be tailored to specific medical problems. To facilitate this seemingly Herculean task, this paper develops concepts and principles derived from operation research, and illustrates their application by three examples. The generic conclusion evidenced by the latter is that the linkage between analytic performance goals and medical strategies is reciprocal, namely that outcome can just as well be optimized by tailoring medical strategy to existing analytic performance as by adapting analytic performance to medical strategy.