Abstract
Turnaround time is one of the most widely reported laboratory quality indicators, yet the interval conventionally measured --
receipt of sample in the laboratory to result verification -- is not the interval a requesting clinician actually experiences, which
runs from the decision to order the test to the result appearing where the clinician will see it. We measured both intervals in
parallel across 14,206 emergency department chemistry orders at three hospitals over six months and quantified the gap between
them. The laboratory-only interval met the target of under sixty minutes for 91.4% of orders, while the clinician-experienced
interval, which additionally captured specimen collection delay and results system display latency, met the same sixty-minute
target for only 68.2% of the same orders. Specimen collection delay -- the time between order placement and sample arrival at the
bedside phlebotomy round -- accounted for the largest share of the gap. We argue that a laboratory reporting only the
conventional interval risks materially overstating service performance as experienced by the clinicians it serves.
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