What's New: November 2015

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

Here's what's new on the Westgard Website this month:

2015 Global Measurement Uncertainty Survey Results:  Much ado about  MU

More than 550 laboratory professionals from more than 85 countries responded to the 2015 Global Measurement Uncertainty Survey.

The results paint a stark picture of the gulf between the US and the rest of the world. While a majority of labs in the US don't use measurement uncertainty, the majority of the rest of the world does.

But even for those labs that calculate measurement uncertainty, as mandated by ISO 15189, there's a lot left to be desired about how they use (or don't use) mu.

We've separated the results into US and Global (non-US) partitions, all for your review:

Global Survey results
Global Survey comments (the believers, the beleaguered, etc.)
US Survey results
US Survey comments (the blissfully ignorant, the CLIA-compliant, etc.)
Survey participants (countries and count)
 

Now on YouTube: Sigma Matters

A free video is now available on YouTube, thanks to AACC and Abbott Diagnostics.
This is from an industry workshop at this year's AACC/ASCLS on Sigma-metrics with Sten Westgard, Dr. Joseph Litten of ValleyHealth and Dr. Phil Bach of Intermountain Health, who implemented Sigma-metrics and adopted advanced quality practices that go beyond Six Sigma.

[Please note: this workshop was, and the new YouTube video is, sponsored by Abbott Diagnostics]

Do you want to transform Lab Quality with Six Sigma, Informatics, and Moving Averages? Check out this Free YouTube Video
 

Break all the Rules, Part 2: Answers

Two controls definitely more than doubles the trouble you might experience with QC. In the second part of our Basic QC Practices series, we sort out the within-run, across-level rules from the across-run, within-level rules(!). You need to keep both eyes on the charts if you want to be sure you're detecting the important outliers. 

Did you catch these errors? Or did they catch you?
 

 
Welcome PPUKM Hospital to Sigma VP

Pusat Perubatan Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (PPUKM) Hospital has become the first university hospital in Malaysia to achieve the Westgard Sigma Verification of Performance.

See the list of assays verified and view the Sigma Decision Charts for PPUKM Hospital


We are also proud to announce that the three pilot laboratories have achieved their re-verification for the second year. Medical City in Manila, Sunway Medical Centre in Kuala Lumpur, and Bumrungrad International Hospital in Bangkok not only re-verified their performance, in many cases they expanded the number of analytes covered, improved their performance, and even expanded their approach to cover pre- and post-analytical processes.


Explore the Sigma Verification of Performance [VP] Program here and see labs that have already succeeded.