Perhaps more than any other area of clinical medicine, anticoagulation management laboratory data are evaluated hourly by healthcare systems in the inpatient setting and daily in the outpatient setting to provide efficacy, safety, and markers of clinical success for drugs and disease states relating to embolic disease. These laboratory data provide answers that in their absence, or a failure of understanding, can result in patient harm or death. Accordingly, laboratory staff, pharmacists, hematologists, and pathologists supervising these efforts need concise, evidence-based, expert-endorsed information upon which to predicate their ability to understand and provide the same. This continuing education activity will discuss these issues, allowing participants to provide clinical laboratory data with the highest integrity and service to their patients.