REVIEW ARTICLE
Assessing the Reliability of Commercially Available Point of Care in Various Clinical Fields
Federica Pezzuto1, Antonio Scarano2, Carlotta Marini3, Giacomo Rossi3, Roberta Stocchi3, Alfredo Di Cerbo4, Alessandro Di Cerbo3, *
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2019Volume: 12
First Page: 342
Last Page: 368
Publisher ID: TOPHJ-12-342
DOI: 10.2174/1874944501912010342
Article History:
Received Date: 06/06/2019Revision Received Date: 24/07/2019
Acceptance Date: 04/08/2019
Electronic publication date: 30/08/2019
Collection year: 2019
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Updated and precise molecular diagnostics are essential in disease identification, treatment and management. Conventional technologies are limited to laboratories, which are expensive, require moderate to great volumes of biological fluids and generally create great discomfort among patients. This review discusses some key features of commercially available point of care (POC) devices, such as time to provide results, accuracy and imprecision, in several medical and veterinary fields. We searched Pubmed/Medline using the keywords “point” “of” “care” “device”, selected papers from 1984 to 2019 on the basis of their content and summarized the features in tables.
Fast turnaround time and overall good reliability, in terms of accuracy and imprecision, were observed for most of POCs included in the research.
POC devices are particularly useful for clinicians since they hold the potential to deliver rapid and accurate results in an inexpensive and less invasive way with an overall improvement of patients' quality of life in terms of time spent at the point-of-care and sample volume withdrawn. These features gain great relevance also in the veterinary practice, where patients’ compliance is generally poor, available sample volumes are quite far from the human ones and analysis costs are higher.
