03RC1 Point of care monitoring of blood: invasive and non-invasive monitoring

The term ‘Point of Care’ with respect to point-of-care testing (POCT) or point-of-care monitoring (POCM) covers a broad range of medical devices. POCT is defined as clinical laboratory testing conducted close to the site of patient care, typically used by clinical personnel whose primary training is not in the laboratory sciences or by patients self-testing [1]. Because of the rapidly increasing ability to acquire information with reduced effort and the financial benefits it brings for the manufacturer, the proportion of POCT and POCM tools used in clinical practice is continually increasing [2]. Furthermore, we can observe a shift from POCT to POCM. While POCT tends to consider a number of semi-quantitative tests, POCM also includes the close monitoring of patients with a built-in alarm generation system.