Basic QC Practices

In 2025, the Westgard Great Global Survey assessed how many labs are implementing Patient Data QC. Do labs that do more Patient Data QC experience better troubleshooting practices?

 The 2025 Global QC Survey Results: How do labs using Patient Data QC differ from those who don't? 

Sten Westgard, MS
December 2025

[This survey was completed with the support and partnership of Thermo Fisher MAS controls.]

In 2025, have QC practices around the world improved or declined?

We surveyed laboratories in 2017 and 2021 about their quality control practices. We did it again in 2025.

We got over 1,280 complete, qualified responses, which break down as follows:

• Africa 118 responses
• Asia 289 responses (note that we include everywhere from India to Australia within this group)
• Europe 143 responses
• Latin and South America 114 responses
• Middle-east 146 responses
• United States and Puerto Rico 440 responses

Asia:  2025 Great Global QC Survey Results: Asia Breakout - Westgard QC
Europe:  The 2025 Great Global QC Survey: Europe in isolation - Westgard QC
Middle-East:  2025 Great Global QC Survey Results: Middle East - Westgard QC
Latin and South America:  2025 Great Global QC Survey Results: South and Latin America - Westgard QC
Africa:  2025 Great Global QC Survey Results: Africa - Westgard QC
USA: https://westgard.com/qc-applications/basic-qc-practices/2025-qc-survey-usa.html
All of it together: https://westgard.com/qc-applications/basic-qc-practices/2025-global-qc-survey.html

While we've completed regional analyses, we decided to look deeper at the differences between different types laboratories. 

• Labs that use Patient Data on more than 10% of their menu 109 responses
• Labs that use Patient Data on 5 to 10% of their menu 64 responses
• Labs that use Patient Data on 1 to 5% of their menu 141 response
• Labs that don't use Patient Data at all 877 responses

 Please note, you can click on these graphs and expand them to a larger size. Here they are shrunk down to help make the comparisons easier to visualize.

Do labs using more Patient Data QC repeat their controls less often?

 There's minimal change between labs using various Patient Data QC at different rates. It's hard to see a trend, and possibly there is no significant difference between 73.4% and 76.7% from the non-PDQC labs and those labs using it the most. But if it is real, the return is meager: it takes more than 10% of Patient Data implementation to gain a 3% reduction of QC repeating.  

Do labs using Patient Data QC run new controls less often?

 There seems to be even less differences between labs that don't use PDQC vs those labs that use PDQC the most. Again, the difference between 57.8 and 55.1 might not be statistically significant. Again, it takes more than 10% Patient Data QC to get at under a 3 percent reduction in running new controls.

Do labs using Patient Data QC repeat the new controls more often?

Here, strangely, the use of Patient Data QC appears to make the problem of repeating new controls even worse. Labs with 10% or more of the menu using Patient Data QC are repeating their new controls 4% more often. Again, it may be such a small difference that it's not statistically significant. 

Conclusion

Patient Data QC gets a lot of hype. It's offered as the cure for QC, the replacement, the land of the free QC and smarter detection. But the evidence, again, shows that even labs that use a lot of Patient Data QC are not experiencing significant changes in how they perform their QC. If you're still repeating controls, running new controls, and repeating new controls at the same rate as when you were'nt using Patient Data QC, what was the point?