Results between different clinical laboratory measurement procedures (CLMP) should be equivalent, within clinically meaningful limits, to enable optimal use of clinical guidelines for disease diagnosis and patient management. When laboratory test results are neither standardized nor harmonized, a different numeric result may be obtained for the same clinical sample. Unfortunately, some guidelin...

The major source of errors producing unreliable laboratory test results is the pre-analytical phase with hemolysis accounting for approximately half of them and being the leading cause of unsuitable blood specimens. Hemolysis may produce interference in many laboratory tests by a variety of biological and analytical mechanisms. Consequently, laboratories need to systematically detect and reliab...

UNLABELLED In the framework of a Dutch project named "Calibration 2000" harmonization of antithrombin activity assays was studied. The commutability of potential calibrators for antithrombin was assessed by means of a twin-study design, which is a multicentre, split-patient sample, between-field-methods protocol. The twin-study consisted of simultaneous analysis of fresh-frozen patient plasmas ...

BACKGROUND The EU Clinical Trials Directive (EUCTD) and the EU Clinical Trials Regulation aim to harmonize good clinical practice (GCP) of clinical trials across Member States. Using the Netherlands as a case study, this paper analyzes how endeavours to implement the EUCTD set in motion a dynamic process of institutional change and institutional work. This process lead to substantial difference...

Ontologies are being ever more commonly used in biomedical informatics. The paper provides a survey of some of these uses, and of the relations between ontologies and other terminology resources. In order for ontologies to become truly useful, two objectives must be met. First, ways must be found for the transparent evaluation of ontologies. Second, existing ontologies need to be harmonized. Th...

the world of law has been dominated by waves of codification or re-codification and by currents of harmonization and unification. innumerable institutions, not only in europe but around the globe including in iran, try to bring legal systems together, and to suggest uniform laws. such attempts necessarily rely on comparative law as the first methodological tool. the european experience is an il...

E-Commerce can be streamlined if products and services are unambiguously identified with industryagreed XML tags through the coding of products and services according to standard classification conventions, such as the Universal Standards Products and Services Classification (UNSPSC). Standardized coding allows for more effective electronic purchasing management by spend analysis ,and assists m...

In this paper, we present a platform known as D2Refine for facilitating clinical research study data element harmonization and standardization. D2Refine is developed on top of OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine) and leverages simple interface and extensible architecture of OpenRefine. D2Refine empowers the tabular representation of clinical research study data element definitions by allowing it...