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Blog series: OpenPathology: Issues With Reference Ranges

Blog posts in the series OpenPathology: Issues With Reference Ranges

  1. Posted
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    • OpenPathology

    OpenPathology: Issues with reference ranges — Part 1

    As the OpenPathology project has progressed, we have started to build measures to describe variation between practices, and groups of practices. While comparing rates of requests per head of population can be used as a simple measure of possible over- or under-use of tests compared to other practices, it doesn’t take into account the general health needs of the population, so it can be difficult to rule out warranted variation. Therefore, comparing variation in rates of abnormal results is another useful measure to consider.

  2. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPathology

    OpenPathology: Issues with reference ranges — Part 2

    This is the second installment in our series of commentaries on reference ranges used to interpret pathology test results. Here we describe two issues relating to how meaningful reference ranges are. Reference ranges are usually indicators of statistical outliers in a healthy reference population The most common type of reference range is defined as the interval between which 95% of the values of a healthy reference population fall into. In other words, 2.

  3. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPathology

    OpenPathology: Issues with reference ranges — Part 3

    This is the third instalment in our series of commentaries on using reference ranges to interpret pathology test results. Reference ranges vary between labs Classically, the reference range is defined statistically: it is the interval within which 95% of the values of a healthy reference population fall into. Therefore 2.5% of the time, healthy people will have (for example) haemoglobin concentrations less than the lower limit, and 2.5% of the time it will be over the upper limit.