Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

On August 16th of this year, CMS issued a new memo about IQCPs. If you recall, IQCP stands for  Individualized Quality Control Plan, and it's part of the new Risk QC being proposed by CMS as a replacement for EQC. The CLSI guideline EP23, which came out about two years ago, laid out the broad outlines of this new policy, but we have been waiting for the government regulations to spell out the specifics of implementation and interpretation.

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

The biggest news coming out of the AACC/ASCLS conference in Houston was made by Judy Yost of CMS.

So the new future is IQCP. Remember what that stands for?

• It's Quickly Coming to Pass
• I've Quit Caring about Performance
• It's Quackery, Chaos, and Pablum
• I'm Quietly Compromising my Processes 

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

There was some very interesting testimony given in front of the US Congress this week. Boeing and other FAA officials discussed their failure to adequately test the lithium-ion batteries found in the 787 Dreamliner. As you probably already know, on two of the Dreamliners, those batteries malfunctioned and caused fires, which then caused the entire fleet to be grounded.

In the New York Times, it was reported "Boeing’s chief engineer on the 787, Mike Sinnett, said the calculation that a battery would fail only once every 10 million flight hours applied to the design of the battery and did not include possible manufacturing flaws."

In fact, two battery failures and serious fires occurred after less than 52,000 flight hours. The risk was actually over 350 times higher than their estimate!

How could they be so wrong? More after the jump...

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS