This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Citing articles on Web of Science (4)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Elias Amador, MD

JAMA. 1976;236(10):1162-1165.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

PHYSICIANS use the clinical laboratory to obtain more information each year. The kinds of laboratory tests have grown steadily for the past 30 years (Fig 1). Even more strikingly, the total tests produced by the clinical laboratory have grown exponentially (Fig 2) at a compound rate of about 13% per year (Table 1). The demand is now so large that for the year 1974, the clinical laboratories in the United States produced an estimated 4 billion tests.¹

Most of these tests are done in local clinical laboratories, which, however, are not equipped to perform all the various types of tests needed by the physicians in a given region. In order to solve this problem, one solution would be to do nonemergency tests in a central laboratory, with each clinical facility retaining a small laboratory for emergency service.¹ Such a shared laboratory system could perform most tests, including the . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
From the departments of pathology, Charles R. Drew Postgraduate Medical School, University of Southern California School of Medicine, and the Los Angeles County/Martin Luther King, Jr, General Hospital, Los Angeles.

Footnotes
Reprint requests to Martin Luther King, Jr, General Hospital, 12021 S Wilmington Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90059 (Dr Amador).

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?