Critical values launch interpretive lab medicine and clinical pathology

: George D. Lundberg, MD, has been credited with “inventing” — or, perhaps, more accurately “first implement-ing” — the system of critical-value reporting in 1970. He recently said that “... the critical value can serve as a nidus or a launching part for the whole issue of interpretive laboratory medicine, interpretive clinical pathology, because all of us in pathology know that large numbers of clinicians haven’t the foggiest notion how to properly order laboratory tests or how to interpret them correctly.” With the advent of lab automation, which is part of the solution to losing scores of retiring “seasoned” MTs and MLTs who have the experiential knowledge that newcomers do not, will the concept of criti-cal values and/or the process of establishing critical values change in any substantial way(s) — how and why?D. Robert Dufour, MD: