Point-of-care testing (POCT) is a medical test done right beside the patient, with a small analyser, instead of sending the sample to a laboratory. The result comes in a few minutes, so the doctor or health worker can act during the same visit. Two common examples are the blood-gas analyser in an intensive care unit and the haemoglobin meter in a village clinic.
A point-of-care analyser is small and simple to use. The person doing the test puts a drop of blood into a disposable cartridge, or into a thin plastic holder called a cuvette. The cartridge or cuvette already holds the chemicals for the test. The analyser reads the result with a light sensor or with tiny electrodes. Nurses and health workers, not only laboratory staff, can run it after a short training.
Speed matters most in two kinds of place. The first is the intensive care unit (ICU). A blood-gas analyser measures the oxygen, the carbon dioxide and the acidity of the blood in about a minute. The doctor uses these numbers to adjust a ventilator straight away. Waiting an hour for the central lab would be too slow.
The second is a place with no lab at all. Consider a health and wellness centre in a village near Barmer, Rajasthan. A community health officer is seeing a woman who is five months pregnant. She pricks the woman's finger and fills a cuvette with one drop of blood. A minute later, the haemoglobin meter reads 8.9 grams per decilitre (g/dL). In pregnancy, a value below 11 g/dL counts as anaemia, and a value below 7 counts as severe anaemia. Anaemia is a shortage of the red blood cells that carry oxygen. So this woman has moderate anaemia. The officer starts her on iron tablets and books a check after one month. Without the meter, the sample would have gone to a lab in town, and the woman might never have come back for the result. Anaemia is common among pregnant women in India, so a quick test in the village matters.
Point-of-care results are not always recorded properly. A result noted on paper can be lost, and a result typed in by hand can be typed wrong. So newer analysers connect to the laboratory information system or the hospital EHR. They send each result with the patient's ID and the ID of the person who ran the test. In an ICU, the blood-gas result also goes to ICU device integration software, next to the patient's vital signs.
A point-of-care analyser differs from a clinical lab analyser. A lab analyser runs hundreds of samples an hour and many kinds of test. A point-of-care analyser runs one sample at a time and fewer kinds of test, but it gives the result where the patient is.