Clinical pathologist in Korea--training program and its roles in laboratories.

A rapid development of practice of laboratory medicine in Korea owes its success to the clinical pathologists (CP), who have played a role of a pathfinder for laboratories. The Korean CP postgraduate education (residency) program is unique in that it is exclusively for laboratory medicine. The training program for clinical pathologists includes diagnostic hematology, diagnostic immunology, clinical microbiology, clinical chemistry, blood bank, diagnostic genetics, informatics and laboratory management. The program has produced a strong group of about 600 laboratory physicians, officially clinical pathologists since 1963. Most of Korean clinical pathologists work as laboratory directors, directors of university hospital laboratories or teaching faculty members in medical schools. The roles of clinical pathologists are laboratory management, interpretation of laboratory test results, clinical consulting services to clinicians and patients, ordering secondary tests after reviews of requested test results and utilization management. The clinical pathologists have developed clinical laboratories to be a main contributor for improved medical practice. During the last 40 years under the turbulent healthcare system, clinical pathologists have significantly contributed to safeguard the laboratory interests. The education program and the role of clinical pathologists are described.

The development of systematic quality control method using laboratory information system and unity program.

Quality control (QC) process is performed to detect and correct errors in the laboratory, of which systematic errors are repeated and affect all the laboratory process thereafter. This makes it necessary for all the laboratories to detect and correct errors effectively and efficiently. We developed an on-line quality assurance system for detection and correction of systematic error, and linked it to the Unity Plus/Pro (Bio-Rad Laboratories, Irvine, USA), a commercially available quality management system. The laboratory information system based on the client-server paradigm was developed using NCR3600 (NCR, West Columbia, USA) as the server and database for server was Oracle 7.2 (Oracle, Belmont, USA) and development tool was Powerbuilder (Powersoft Burlignton, UK). Each QC material is registered and gets its own identification number and tested the same way as patient sample. The resulting QC data is entered into the Unity Plus/Pro program by in-house data entering program or by manual input. With the implementation of in-house laboratory information system (LIS) and linking it to Unity Plus/Pro, we could apply Westgard's multi-rule for higher error detection rate, resulting in more systematic and precise quality assurance for laboratory product, as well as complementary to conventional external quality assessment.