Handling all the threats to blood-sample integrity is an enormously complex undertaking. Human blood is complicated. We’ve been studying it for centuries and we still don’t know everything there is to know about it. And what we do know is exceedingly difficult to apply every time we handle a sample. That’s because the preanalytical phase, or pre-examination phase, is predominantly a manual process that requires human programming. At the point of collection, machines don’t dra