Assessing the Reliability of Commercially Available Point of Care in Various Clinical Fields

Updated and precise molecular diagnostics are essential in disease identification, treatment and management. Conventional technologies are limited to laboratories, which are expensive, require moderate to great volumes of biological fluids and generally create great discomfort among patients. This review discusses some key features of commercially available point of care (POC) devices, such as time to provide results, accuracy and imprecision, in several medical and veterinary fields. We searched Pubmed/Medline using the keywords “point” “of” “care” “device”, selected papers from 1984 to 2019 on the basis of their content and summarized the features in tables. Fast turnaround time and overall good reliability, in terms of accuracy and imprecision, were observed for most of POCs included in the research. POC devices are particularly useful for clinicians since they hold the potential to deliver rapid and accurate results in an inexpensive and less invasive way with an overall improvement of patients' quality of life in terms of time spent at the point-of-care and sample volume withdrawn. These features gain great relevance also in the veterinary practice, where patients’ compliance is generally poor, available sample volumes are quite far from the human ones and analysis costs are higher.