Clinical and economic appropriateness in Laboratory Medicine – An Application evidence

Appropriateness is one of the most important issues in today’s medicine, from a clinical and more in general multidisciplinary point of view. Thus, a contextual and multifaceted perspective of research and management is indispensable for handling it, also as concerns the Laboratory Medicine (LM), which is ever more characterized as a technology-based science. The case study under investigation, i.e. an accredited private hospital in Italy, has permitted to highlight how an adequate quality management system can provide concrete contribution to handle with appropriateness some test batteries for hospitalized patients waiting for Computerized Tomography (CT) or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Direct result of the observed technological innovation (glomerular filtration rate instead of Bence - Jones and immune-fixation tests) is the increase of the economic appropriateness for a new LM procedure that is first of all appropriate from a clinical point of view.