Bedside glucose testing. Applications in the home and hospital.

Point-of-care testing is an increasingly popular means of delivering diagnostic testing closer to the site of patient care. Although point-of-care glucose testing devices have been around for over a decade, concerns about the quality of the results still plague the industry. Changes in federal and state laws that treat point-of-care testing as an extension of the core laboratory promise to improve the quality of testing. The most challenging aspect of quality testing is selection of the appropriate method (core laboratory versus point-of-care test) for the optimal patient outcome.