Use Of A Clinical Laboratory Computer To Warn Of Possible Drug Interference With Test Results

摘要

Drugs can alter the concentration of important biological substances. This alteration can occur in the body prior to analysis for a substance or it can occur during an actual clinical laboratory test procedure for that substance. The frequent administration of drugs, coupled with the increasing reliance on accurate laboratory data, have led us to develop programs which still automatically warn a physician when test results may be altered due to pharmecuticals. Using a clinical laboratory computer system, software has been developed which checks to determine if the result of any test performed on a patient specimen may be affected by any drug administered to that same patient. If possible interference is detected, a comment is automatically attached to the result on the patient's computer-generated report warning the physician the result may be falsely elevated or lowered. These programs are run on a laboratory computer system whose central processing unit is a Control Data Corporation, model 1784, computer with 16-bit words and 256K bytes of central storage. All programs are written in Control Data Corporation FORTRAN IV.