This is a superb publication. It should be required reading for every person involved in clinical laboratory management. Consisting of 274 pages broken into 15 chapters by 12 authors, it represents the embellished proceedings of a 1971 San Francisco conference (of the title name) that addressed the basic areas of "Systems Techniques", "Cost Control", and "Evaluation of Equipment". Every chapter is good, but I liked especially the chapters entitled "Administrative Structure and Decision Making in the Automated Clinical Laboratory," "Optimum Turn-Around-Time for Laboratory Information," and "A Unified Concept of Clinical Laboratory Management."
Clinical laboratories are fundamentally factories of which numerical or alphabetical results are the product. The days when the pathologist was the funny little guy in the basement next to the morgue who was running away from people are long gone. The clinical pathologist of this decade must first be a manager, par excellence, or he will fail.