How uncertainty is used in the real world

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

During my travels, I came across this at a laboratory which shall remain anonymous, where they are required by ISO 15189 to report measurement uncertainty to their clinicians:

If you can't read that interpretive comment, I'll spell it out after the jump...

So here is what the laboratory information system warns the clinician if they go looking for a statement of measurement uncertainty about a test result:

"Intended for inter-laboratory uncertainty comparison purposes, yielding the interval around the measured value that with 95% confidence contains the true result. Only includes analytical sources of uncertainty (excludes pre-analytical and biological variations). Not directly clinically applicable."

My emphasis added.