Table.

The Milan hierarchy for analytical quality reconsidered in terms of all phases of laboratory testing.

	Pre-Pre-Analytical	Pre-Analytical	Analytical	Post-Analytical	Post-Post-Analytical
Clinical Outcome	Choose tests that can improve outcome	Prevent errors that may be harmful	Clinical Outcome	Reports that facilitate follow-up	Clinical action that improves patient outcome
Identify abnormality	Choose tests likely to be abnormal	Detect errors in patient identification or sampling	Biological Variation	Harmonised reference limits define ‘abnormals’	Clinical action in response to abnormal result
Peer based standard	Consistent with peers based requesting	Consistent with peer based sampling	State of the Art	Consistent with peer based reports	Consistent with peers based clinical actions