Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

A recent article about the experience of QMS tracking in a clinical laboratory in Nigeria raised some interesting questions about sources of errors in "developing world" laboratories.

Where would you expect a Nigerian Human Virology laboratory (HVL) to experience the most problems?

• pre-analytical processes
• analytical processes
• post-analytical processes

The answer, after the jump...

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

I came across a very valuable paper in Clinica Chimica Acta on the stability of hematology controls for MCV. (Some of you are already guessing what this is going to be about...)

If you take a hematology control, how many SDs should you expect to see it shift at week 5 of use versus the first week of use? In other words, what is the SDI you should expect?

• 1 SDI
• 2 SDI
• 3 SDI
• 4 SDI
• 5 SDI
• higher than 5 SDI

The answer, after the jump...

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

According to a recent CAP Q-Probe, approximately how many glucose tests are being bracketed by QC events?

Is it

• 5,000 tests between QC runs
• 500 tests between QC runs
• 50 tests between QC runs
• 5 tests between QC runs

The answer, after the jump

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

Diagnostic errors are one of the "new" hot topics in the healthcare field. A new study from British Medical Journal of Quality and Safety has a chilling estimate of just how common diagnostic errors are occurring in outpatient settings.

So what's your guess? How often in the US are diagnostic errors being made in outpatient settings?

• about 1 in 5 visits
• about 1 in 10 visits
• about 1 in 20 visits
• about 1 in 50 visits
• about 1 in 100 visits

The study's conclusion, after the jump...

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

Earlier this month (July) I came across a series of revealing posts on a listserv about the quality of  glucose meters. For me, it raised the question, just what defect rate is acceptable at the point of care?

• 0.00034%
• 1%
• 5%
• 10%
• 40%
• 75%
• 100%

What level of defect rate do you believe is being seen at the point of care? the answer (after the jump) might astonish you...

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

While we recently got a study that estimated the (frightenly high) number of Adverse Events caused by US hospitals, it looks like other countries are not content to let us stand alone. Now Sweden is doing us one better. Guess what the Adverse Event rate is in one hospital in Sweden?

• 28.2%
• 20.5%
• 6.3%
• 3.32%

 Which number would you choose?

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

Fresh on the heels of a study about error rates in a Romanian hospital, now we've got a new study about pre-analytical error rates at a Chinese hospital:

Corrected reports in laboratory medicine in a Chinese University hospital for 3 years, Liu X, Jiang Y, Zeng R, Zaho H, Clin Chem Lab Med 2014;52(4):e57-e59

Want to guess how many errors this lab experienced out of 1.1 million test reports in 2012?

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

We've all heard the infamous quote now over a decade and a half old: that US hospitals kill between roughly 40,000 and 90,000 patients each year. This was an estimate courtesy of the Institute of Medicine report "To Err Is Human" which made the dire performance of hospitals knowledge that even the general public could understand.

But more recently, studies have been tracking the adverse event rates much more closely. A recent NEJM paper followed four conditions from 2005 to 2011.

Of these four conditions, which do you think has the best Sigma performance when it comes to the occurrence of adverse events?

A. Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI)

B. Congestive Heart Failure

C. Pneumonia

D. (other) Conditions Requiring Surgery

The answer, after the jump...

A recent New York Times Sunday editorial focused on the deplorable state of medical device regulation. We simply can no longer trust FDA clearances, particularly 510ks:

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS