The effect of benchmarking clinical practice with the clinical laboratory. An institutional case study

The improvement of quality in clinical care can greatly benefit form continuous benchmarking with information based on laboratory data. To be most effective, the information is best provided in the form of real-time disease management decision support. Such an approach requires advances in the implementation of hospital information systems. This article describes ground-breaking work at LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah that provides examples of major well-documented impacts of the "intelligent laboratory report" on patient outcomes.