The goal of clinical laboratories is to produce accurate information for clinical decision making in medicine. More than half of the medical decisions made depend on clinical laboratory tests.

Patient safety represents an important and critical problem for laboratories. They need to assure that the information they deliver to physicians is accurate, and therefore safe for clinicians to use. Endogenous compounds can interfere with laboratory tests, decreasing accuracy and threatening patient safety. Elevated bilirubin (bilirubinemia) and elevated lipids (lipemia) are common...