Recent years have seen increasing emphasis on cost containment and quality improvement in clinical laboratory activities. Modifying those activities to enhance clinical relevance is one strategy that should be satisfying to both laboratory scientists and administrators. This guest commentary describes one approach to quality improvement-the use of user surveys to identify areas for improvement. As an initial attempt to define such areas in clinical diagnostic microbiology, infectious disease specialists, targeted for their particular interest and expertise in microbiology laboratory results, were polled and their responses were analyzed. Some of these data have been presented previously (E. J. Baron, D. P. Francis, and K. M. Peddecord, abstr. C-170, p. 520, in Abstracts of the 94th General Meeting of the