AACC Academy's Pain Management LMPG: Verification of Drug Dosing with Quantitative Urine Drug Testing?

Abstract

Clinical practice guidelines have become a mainstay for streamlining medical practices and function to ensure uniformity. Clinical practice guidelines are relevant in the world of laboratory medicine, given the large number of medical decisions that are based on the result of a clinical laboratory test. The first set of guidelines was created in 1995 by the National Academy of Clinical Biochemistry (now the AACC Academy) and was called “Standards of Laboratory Practice.” The topic was the laboratory support of thyroid disease, and the guidelines were first published as a series of papers (1) and then widely distributed as a monograph. Later, guidelines were produced under the label “Laboratory Medicine Practice Guidelines” (LMPGs). In this issue of JALM , the Academy's latest LMPG addresses laboratory tests to monitor drug therapy in pain management patients (2). As an author of several other LMPGs, including one on laboratory tests to support cases of drug poisoning (3), a coauthor of a recently released toxicology guideline, the Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute Guideline on Toxicology and …