Enhancing crisis standards of care using innovative point-of-care testing

Point of care testing: evolving scenarios and innovative perspectives.

Rapid point-of-care testing (POCT) for blood gas analysis, glucose, electrolytes, prothrombin time and other parameters including cardiac biomarkers has been available for a long time and has now become a rather ordinary diagnostic tool worldwide. By nature, POCT is a disruptive solution since it permits the rapid delivery of laboratory information at the point of need, using small amounts of s...

Correlation between Standard Clinical Chemistry and Point of Care Testing Analyzers on Hemoglobin A1C Determination

National preparedness for a catastrophic emergency: crisis standards of care.

PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCIES UNDERSCORE THE IMMEdiate and crucial need to plan for a mass disaster in which tens or even hundreds of thousands of individuals suddenly require medical care. On October 24, 2009, President Obama declared a public health emergency in response to influenza A(H1N1), but natural disasters (eg, hurricanes, floods, or earthquakes) and terrorism acts (eg, anthrax or a nucle...

Multiplexed Point-of-Care Testing – xPOCT

Multiplexed point-of-care testing (xPOCT), which is simultaneous on-site detection of different analytes from a single specimen, has recently gained increasing importance for clinical diagnostics, with emerging applications in resource-limited settings (such as in the developing world, in doctors' offices, or directly at home). Nevertheless, only single-analyte approaches are typically consider...

Microfluidics and point-of-care testing.

In many ways, the intrinsic features of microfluidics are a natural fit for a pointof-care (POC) diagnostics device (i.e. a diagnostic test performed near the patient without needing a clinical lab): low consumption of reagents and sample, miniaturization of device, and fast turnaround time for analysis. Thus, it comes as no surprise that much research, since the inception of modern microfluidi...