Dear readers:

The IFCC 2008 General Conference is already several weeks old, but I sincerely hope that some of the results and the positive momentum generated at the beautiful Turkish coast will carry into the immediate future.

Especially the workshop format chosen for the second day turned out to be an excellent way how to engage everybody attending, and I am still impressed by outcome of these workshop groups composed of representatives from National Societies (Full and Extended Members) as well as Corporate Members. Which proved to me what I knew before: that IFCC is an organization of very capable volunteers. What I did not know: these IFCC people can create very structured results even when working in a relatively unstructured ad hoc way.

Well, I had the honour to conclude day one that was devoted to reports from the IFCC Divisions, Regional Federations, Task Forces, etc. with a presentation from a Corporate Members� perspective.

Earlier that day, we had a meeting of the Corporate Member representatives, and fortunately, I received sufficient support for some key points of my presentation. Fortunately because, as in any other industry, the IFCC member companies are competing with each other and only rarely cooperate; thus to reach a consensus might have been very ambitious. However, there is enough common ground among the Corporate Members, and it ties back to the reasons why they became IFCC Corporate Members in the first place:

• To ensure that information generated using laboratory tests is correct, consistent, and meaningful
• To increase the quality of health care by intelligent utilization of diagnostic information, including new technologies
• To raise awareness about Laboratory Medicine�s value in overall health care with the general public, politicians, and health care payers and providers

While these areas of mutual interest overlap nicely with the vision of the IFCC Executive Board, there is � as everywhere else � a lot of room for improvement for IFCC. Although most Corporate Member representatives would also support the following suggestions, these are entirely my thoughts based on the interactions with numerous individuals in the various IFCC activities over the last 30 months or so.

IFCC is recognized as the leading global organization promoting the science and use of Laboratory Medicine, but �science� certainly should not be limited to standardization/reference system efforts exclusively. The practical impact on healthcare delivery today and in the future would be more pronounced if IFCC increases its efforts e.g. in evidence-based medicine demonstrating that proper diagnostic information and interpretation actually benefits patients and the efficiency of healthcare providers.

Next, Laboratory Medicine to me is an applied science. We need to live up to that in acknowledging that implementation aspects (like how to educate the medical world, regulatory bodies, patients or how to adopt certain changes in package inserts and other labelling of diagnostic products) are equally important compared to the pure scientific achievement � which has no impact if it is not implemented...

So already when choosing the next e.g. standardization project, some of the questions should be: how will the final outcome influence patient health, what regulatory or habitual hurdles will have to be cleared, etc. (i.e. how easy or difficult will it be to implement the yet unknown result) � and make our choices accordingly what projects to pursue. But of course implementation issues really need to be addressed once a final result is available, e.g. by providing educational or other material to medical associations, patient groups and/or regulatory authorities. Here, it might be a good idea to label all results of e.g. IFCC Working Groups �preliminary� if there are certain pieces missing in terms of implementation.

The IFCC Task Forces or the new Integrated Projects already addressed some of these aspects. Moreover, if you review the results from the General Conference ad hoc groups, you will see that there clearly is willingness, if not momentum to move beyond the immediate or historic competency areas of IFCC among its various members.

So, dear readers, I came away from the General Conference with a cautiously optimistic view that IFCC will soon make more pronounced steps into the right direction. After all, IFCC is us, individuals who devote some extra time to promote Laboratory Medicine and its value globally.

Sincerely yours

Norbert Madry, PhD