Professional paper LABORATORY MEDICINE IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE: CAN WE CATCH UP?

and cellular concepts and techniques to the understanding and evaluation of human health and disease. At the core of the discipline is the provision of results of measurements and observations relevant to the cause of disease, the maintenance of health and the conversion of these data into specific and general patient- and disease-related information at the laboratory-clinician interface. The discipline is committed to deepening the understanding of health and disease through fundamental and applied research. Furthermore, there are increasing health care expectations and consequently increasing demands of health care resources. Because of the increasing health costs, governments of many European countries have cut health care expenditure, often by decreasing the funding of acute care facilities, closing hospitals, outsourcing services or privatizing health care. Medical laboratories, highly dependent on rapidly changing, expensive and sophisticate technologies, have especially been affected by these policies. Several trends in medical laboratories are developing simultaneously: · Centralization of diagnostic medical laboratories, rationalization of services, increased emphasis on cost-benefit analysis and cost-effective total patient care, linked to improving outcomes. · Development of highly specialized laboratories at the interface with research. · Implementation of point of care technology. · Development of molecular biology procedures improving diagnosis of infections and inherited diseases