Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Last month, Advance for the Laboratory published a three part series on Six Sigma in the Clinical Laboratory, written by David Plaut, Nathalie Lepage, and Kim Przekop:
While it's great that Advance has invested in in-depth coverage of the Six Sigma topic, unfortunately one of their examples in part 2 demonstrates a misunderstanding of the application.
See the mistake, after the jump...
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Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Two interesting abstracts and papers concerning HbA1c came out recently. As laboratories switch from fasting blood glucose to HbA1c to diagnosis diabetes, the importance of the method performance of HbA1c methods is becoming critical.
But what's more important? Bias or CV?
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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?
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Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
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?
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Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
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...
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Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
I was looking over a recent study of a compact blood gas analyzer conducted over multiple sites, multiple cartridges, multiple days, etc. In other words, this was a study that was doing a very thorough job.
Then I reached a section where suddenly it all fell to nonsense: measurement uncertainty.
So they calculated measurement uncertainty, but then they compared the results against Ricos desirable imprecision performance specifications.
Huh?
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