IFCC is again pleased to collaborate with the Clinical Laboratory Management Association (CLMA) to bring an international dimension to the Increasing Clinical Effectiveness (ICE) programme and award. ICE has been launched to encourage laboratory medicine specialists to collaborate with clinical colleagues to demonstrate that optimal use of the laboratory can have a measurable positive impact on patient outcomes.

ICE is open to any laboratory medicine specialist. He/she is invited to submit an abstract that describes testing-related interventions and the quantifiable positive impact for patients that they produced. Abstracts will be assessed and the winners of the ICE award in 2017/18 will be invited to present their work at the CLMA KnowledgeLab conference, which will be held from 6-9 May 2018 in Long Beach, California, USA.

The window for submitting abstracts to the current ICE award is now open. It will close on 3 November 2017.

Abstracts should be a maximum of 750 words and comprise:

• Statement of problem and background (goal, context, rationale)
• Intervention/study plan/measures (intervention choice, study design, measure appropriateness)
• Data analysis and results (actual data, quality assessment of data, data interpretation, limitations, findings)
• Discussion and lessons learned (conclusions, generalizability, implications for others)

Further information about ICE may be accessed from www.ICE-lab.org, where details can be found of the project, together with instructions on submitting an abstract and on-line training sessions to help choose and deliver the best project for an abstract submission.
A library of the winning and accepted abstracts from previous ICE awards may be found at: http://www.clma.org/p/cm/ld/fid=491