Economic aspects of therapeutic drug monitoring.

In the last two decades two major trends heavily influenced the situation of the clinical laboratories. Cost saving issues have become more and more significant and an exploding number of tests has to be performed by a limited number of technicians. The latter task is facilitated by the use of automated analyzers. The CEDIA assays for therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) can be performed on Boehringer Mannheim/Hitachi systems used for routine clinical chemistry. This means that now it is possible to determine all parameters of clinical chemistry, proteins, and TDM without sample splitting on one analyzer, resulting in saving of manual workload and costs.