CLSI Recognizes World Standards Week.

WAYNE, Pa. -- Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) is proud to recognize the importance of global health care standards as it celebrates World Standards Week this October. The goal of World Standards Week is to raise awareness of the importance of global standardization to the world economy, promote its role in helping meet the needs of business, industry, government, and consumers worldwide, and to pay tribute to the thousands of volunteers around the world who participate in standardization activities. "CLSI is committed to improving health care through the creation of consensus standards for diagnostic testing. CLSI joins the global standardization community during World Standards Week in acknowledging the positive steps forward standardization has made in a variety of fields," says Gerald A. Hoeltge, MD, of Cleveland Clinic, and CLSI President.

World Standards Day began as a celebration of the creation of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the global clearinghouse for all standardization activities, and has evolved into a worldwide opportunity to share and reaffirm the commitment to standardization. In the US, World Standards Day will be commemorated with a week of activities including conferences, exhibits, and special gatherings and events that celebrate standardization as a way to increase US competitiveness and improve the quality of services.

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is one of the founding organizations of World Standards Day, ISO's US representative, and a co-chair of the US World Standards Day Committee. ANSI has delegated to CLSI the responsibility of serving as the Secretariat of the ISO Technical Committee 212, which oversees standardization and guidance in the field of laboratory medicine and in vitro diagnostic test systems. CLSI is proud to contribute to the standardization field in this capacity and to demonstrate its leadership in developing consensus standards and guidelines that improve the quality of health care.

"CLSI recognizes the value and maintains our commitment to standards development, partnership in this effort, and to our volunteers. We are proud to have recently renewed our designation as a 'World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Center' for Clinical Laboratory Standards development. In recent years, we have begun building laboratory capacity in resource-constrained countries through the implementation of clinical laboratory standards. The impact of this model approach has been very positive," states Patricia Rizzo-Price, Vice President Global Health Partnerships.

CLSI has recently published two documents that reinforce its mission of providing quality health care standards and guidelines. C54-A, Verification of Comparability of Patient Results Within One Healthcare System; Approved Guideline, published May 2008, provides guidance on how to verify comparability of quantitative laboratory results for individual patients within a health care system. M50-A, Quality Control for Commercial Microbial Identification Systems; Approved Guideline, published August 2008, provides guidance to ensure optimal performance of a microbial identification system in an efficient and streamlined manner.

For additional information on CLSI or for further information regarding this release, visit the CLSI website at http://www.clsi.org or call +610.688.0100.

CLSI, formerly NCCLS, is a global, nonprofit, membership-based organization dedicated to developing standards and guidelines for the health care and medical testing community. CLSI's unique consensus process facilitates the creation of standards and guidelines that are reliable, practical, and achievable for an effective quality system.