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
An interesting abstract was published at the Paris IFCC meeting. It detailed the EQA performance of a set of 12 public laboratories in Catalonia. Can you guess what the failure rate for these labs for biochemistry EQA?
- 14.5%
- 14%
- 3%
- none of the above
The answer, after the jump...
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Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
We knew that the accreditation agencies needed to develop their own policies to handle the new CMS IQCP regulations. CAP gets the prize for being first out of the gate with some practical steps, as well retaining some safeguards for quality.
IQCP, if it's not already burned into your head, stands for Individualized Quality Control Plan, and this is supposed to be the replacement for the EQC policies which have been in place for several years. The EQC policies are being replaced, you may recall, because they are scientifically untenable. It was hoped that IQCP was going to be more scientifically robust. That remains to be seen. CAP is attempting to assure that it will implement the CMS IQCP regulations but also provide a higher level of quality assurance than that low bar.
More after the jump.
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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...
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Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
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...
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Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
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
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
As many of you know, EQC is out and IQCP is in. As the expiration date for EQC approaches in 2016, labs need to learn more ab
out Risk QC and IQCPs. CMS has an email address where you can send questions.
We tried out the question and answer line with CMS, see the results after the jump...
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