The end of Laboratory Medicine as we know it?

This special issue of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine is dedicated to the 2nd Strategic Conference of the European Federation for Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (EFLM) that was held from 18th to 19th June 2018 in Mannheim, Germany.The congress was entitled "The End of Laboratory Medicine as we know it?Handling disruption of Laboratory Medicine in digital health".The meeting considered the disruptive impact that on-going digitalisation of technologies and a digitalised society may have on the medical laboratory's place in future healthcare.Over the last 50 years, Clinical Chemistry/Laboratory Medicine has been a particularly successful field in diagnostic medicine.It has brought major advances for health care through the adoption of new analytical technologies, fitting them to the purpose of answering diagnostic questions and then implementing them into the medical laboratory for patient care.Up till now the major achievements of Laboratory Medicine include the standardisation of key parameters to allow for commutability and metrological traceability of analytical results, the reference method concept, the definition of reference ranges and the concept of biological variation, etc., all aiming at improving patient safety and health.Currently, Laboratory Medicine keeps hundreds of diagnostic tests available for diagnosis, monitoring and prognosis of disease conditions in the routine health care setting and is developing and introducing newer, better tests through collaborative clinical research.Laboratory Medicine has also fostered important research into pre-analytical and post-analytical influences on test results.Finally, it continues to provide clinical and methodological guidelines and regulations for international network structures and to allow for comprehensive external quality assurance programmes in medical laboratory testing.With the advent of the digital revolution in medicine described as "disruptive" and the "creative destruction of medicine", diagnostic medicine will enter a new arena, and the weights between technical and analytical face of the profession and the new opportunities for compiling, integrating and visualising increasingly complex diagnostic data are very likely to shift.The conference discussed