[Emergency medical care and POCT]

Emergency testing is intended to elucidate the patient's condition; therefore, the ideal emergency testing should be able to be implemented quickly and easily at the patient bedside for 24 hours a day, and the time from test order to result should be as short as possible. In other words, a shorter turn around time (TAT) is better. Needless to say, the most effective way to reduce TAT is to omit all other processes except testing from the test procedure, and bring it as close to the measuring time = TAT as possible. Because we think of emergency testing in this way, the concept of point of care testing (POCT) is the essence of emergency testing and does not threaten the emergency testing domain of laboratory technicians but is of medical origin and aims at the rapid appropriate treatment of patients.