Laboratory Quality Management Systems and Their Impact on Diagnostic Accuracy During Infectious Disease Outbreaks

Philena Amie Sombo

International Journal of Scientific Research in Science and Technology, 2026, vol. 13, issue 4, 284-300

Abstract: Clinical and public health laboratories are indispensable to infectious disease surveillance, case confirmation, patient management, contact tracing, and outbreak containment. During epidemics and pandemics, however, laboratories frequently operate under exceptional pressure arising from rapid increases in specimen volume, emergency recruitment, supply-chain disruption, decentralized testing, accelerated assay deployment, equipment overutilization, and shortened validation timelines. These pressures increase the risk of false-positive, false-negative, invalid, delayed, or incorrectly reported results. This paper examines the influence of laboratory quality management systems on diagnostic accuracy during infectious disease outbreaks. A structured narrative review and framework-synthesis approach was applied to international standards, laboratory quality guidance, peer-reviewed studies, external quality-assessment reports, and documented outbreak experiences. The evidence demonstrates that diagnostic accuracy depends not only on the intrinsic performance of an assay but also on patient identification, specimen selection, collection, transportation, processing, equipment reliability, reagent integrity, personnel competence, quality control, result interpretation, and information management. Published evidence indicates that most documented laboratory errors originate in the pre-analytical phase, while structured quality-improvement programmes have produced measurable reductions in specimen rejection, turnaround time, nonconformities, and external quality-assessment failures. An outbreak-responsive implementation framework is proposed that integrates leadership, risk management, method verification, workforce competency, supply-chain resilience, biosafety, digital information systems, occurrence management, and continuous improvement. The paper concludes that mature laboratory quality management systems improve the probability that diagnostic results remain accurate, timely, traceable, comparable, and clinically useful during infectious disease emergencies.

Keywords: Diagnostic accuracy; external quality assessment; infectious disease outbreaks; laboratory quality management system; pre-analytical error; quality assurance; risk management; total testing process (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ijsrst.com/home/article/view/IJSRST2613432 Abstract page (text/html)
https://ijsrst.com/home/article/download/IJSRST2613432/IJSRST2613432 Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:etm:ijsrst:v13:y2026:i4:id:1756

DOI: 10.32628/IJSRST2613432

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Scientific Research in Science and Technology from Technoscience Academy
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Pankaj Sharma ().