Clinical and Interpretive

If a clinician has reason to suspect that a patient may expire of non-natural causes later in the course of hospital admission, the clinician can order a longer hold of the patient’s admission blood for potential future toxicology testing.  No testing will be performed from this order and nothing will be resulted.  The specimen will be held in a red rack labelled ME in the laboratory walk-in refrigerator.  Blood will be discarded after 30 days unless another hold is ordered or the blood has been requested by the appropriate agency for testing.