ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF LABORATORY MEDICINE SPECIALISTS IN THE VERIFICATION OF METROLOGICAL TRACEABILITY OF IN VITRO MEDICAL DIAGNOSTICS

To be accurate and equivalent, laboratory results should be traceable to higher-order references. Furthermore, their quality should fulfill acceptable measurement uncertainty as defined to fit the intended clinical use. With this aim, in vitro diagnostics (IVD) manufacturers should define a calibration hierarchy to assign traceable values to their system calibrators and to fulfill during this process uncertainty limits for calibrators, which should represent a proportion of the uncertainty budget allowed for clinical laboratory results. It is therefore important that, on one hand, the laboratory profession clearly defines the clinically acceptable uncertainty for relevant tests and, on the other hand, endusers may know and verify how manufacturers have implemented the traceability of their calibrators and estimated the corresponding uncertainty. Important tools for IVD traceability surveillance are quality control programmes through the daily verification by clinical laboratories that control materials of analytical systems are in the manufacturer's declared validation range [Internal Quality Control (IQC) component I] and the organization of External Quality Assessment Schemes meeting metrological criteria. In a separate way, clinical laboratories should also monitor the reliability of employed commercial systems through the IQC component II, devoted to estimation of the measurement uncertainty due to random effects, which includes analytical system imprecision together with individual laboratory performance in terms of variability.