What's New on Westgard Web: April 2011

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

Here are the articles that have been recently added to Westgard Web:

QC Reality Check, Part 3

Dietmar Stockl, PhD, continues his series on real-world internal QC (IQC) scenarios. What happens when the laboratory purposely sets the wrong target?

Shouldn't different modules of the same instrument produce the same result?

QC for the Future, Six Years Later

Back in 2005, CLSI held a conference on "QC for the Future." At the time, the specific future that CLSI envisioned was expected to reach us shortly, with promises of accelerated ratification of new guidelines. The road to the future was longer than anticipated, as it turns out, and we may have ended up in a different place.

What's the future of QC for the future?

Sigma-metric Analysis: Olympus AU2700 Plus

A 2010 study assessed the performance of an Olympus AU2700 plus using biologically-derived specifications for maximum imprecision and maximum bias. So what would happen if we applied biologically-derived specifications for allowable total error? Or, for that matter, if we applied Rilibak or CLIA quality requirements?

Sigma-metrics with different quality requirements: AU2700 plus

Error Rates in the Total Testing Process

For more than a decade, conventional wisdom has it that analytical errors happen so rarely that we can safely ignore them and concentrate on other problems. But a new 2011 study, looking back on 5 years of data, challenges that assumption.

What are the Sigma-metrics of pre-analytical errors?