Taxonomy of Challenges in Medical Laboratory Diagnostic Services

The Sustainable development goals 2030 has focused on human health and is dependent on a nation?s healthcare system. Medical diagnostic laboratory services (MDLS) plays an important role in the modern healthcare system as it significantly helps in evidence-based decision-making. The MDLS suffers from many issues identified both globally as well as nationally with steps taken to address those challenges. However, constrained understanding of challenges affecting MDLS made it difficult to design interventions which can cater to laboratory systems in more holistic and standardised manner. Accordingly, it is required to categorize and develop the taxonomy of the various challenges existing in MDLS that will help in defining the scope of challenges and will provide an overview of the various challenges to which a laboratory can get exposed to. This study develops the taxonomy of challenges that can be encountered in MDLS using systematic review. Further, the existence of those challenges in the Indian context is determined that will potentially validate theoretically identified challenges. In the study, the analysis for Indian context is performed using content analysis over the content collected by interacting with various health experts like doctors, lab managers and lab technicians coming from different type of laboratories. The study identified 30 challenges which are categorized in the three-layer hierarchy. The first layer consisted of two challenges followed by eight challenges in the second layer and 20 challenges in the third layer. Out of the 20 challenges in the last layer, 16 challenges could be identified in the Indian context based on the content analysis of the experts interactions. The study concludes that the challenges exist for the MDLS which could be categorized into three layers.