Histopathology - Immunohistochemistry correlation: three Years’ Experience in a rural based tertiary care hospital

Context: Immunohistochemistry (IHC) is regarded as confirmatory test and histopathology-IHC correlation is considered a good quality indicator to assess diagnostic accuracy of histopathology laboratory. Aims: The goal of this study was to find diagnostic discrepancy between histopathology and IHC in an effort to improve the performance of the laboratory. Methods and material: A retrospective analysis was done in Histopathology section of Central Diagnostic Laboratory of Shree Krishna Hospital, Karamsad. In this study, during the study period of three years (from 2013 to 2015 till October) cases for which IHC was requested were included. Total number of concordances and discordances are assessed to improve histopathological diagnostic accuracy. For each discordant case root cause analysis was done to identify areas of weakness. Statistical analysis used: none Results: During the study period total 145 cases were sent for IHC. Out of which 124 (85.51%) samples had concordance and 21 (14.48%) had discordance. During the year 2013, 2014 and 2015(till October), number of discordances in histopathology and IHC were 29.41%, 11.11% and 12.87% respectively. Conclusions: This comparison of histopathology-IHC diagnosis over the last three years has helped us significantly to improve our laboratory services in terms of performance evaluation, patient care and overall quality of laboratory practices.