Quality Control and Test Criteria in Ergometry

Quality control is an established requirement in medicine. It is strongly related to standardization on the one hand and to test criteria on the other. Quality assurance is a basic procedure in clinical chemistry, but it has been neglected in ergometry. Recent results on ergometer calibration tests yielded deviations between measured and indicated power output of about 50% [2,11]. Obviously, there is a need for quality control in cardiovascular testing, especially in stress testing. This can be underlined by recommendations proposed by the American Heart Association (AHA) [5] and by recent efforts of the German Society for Cardiovascular Research to establish quality control criteria. Further, as has been shown by Philbrick et al. [15], exercise testing requires methodological improvements in patient selection, data collection and data analysis. The enthusiasm about the Bayes’ theorem again highlights the need for an improved approach to interpretation of stress testing, another aspect of quality control [3,14,16, 20].