IFCC Global Survey of QC Standards and Practices
A new IFCC survey of global practices highlights some old problems.
Basic QC Practices
Accentuating the Positive controls for COVID19
How should we handle positive controls in SARS-COV-2 assays? What's the upside of examining a data set that contains a real error?
QC 2018: The Truth Standard for Laboratory Testing Still Applies
A recent publication of large academic medical centers in the USA revealed that 90% of them still set their control limits at 2 standard deviations from the mean, and only 10% use a variation of the "Westgard Rules". Have we really fallen so far?
A New Look at Italian Error Rates
A new abstract for the IFCC meeting in Istanbul returns to Italy to study the frequency of errors in laboratory processes across the Total Testing Process. Italy was where the study of errors rates really began back in 1997. Has Italy improved since then?
A look at pre-analytical error rates, 2014
A new study looks at the frequency of errors in laboratory processes across the Total Testing Process. The study covers pre-analytical error rates from 2011 at the County Emergency Clinical Hospital in Timisoara, Romania. We looked at pre-analytic rates a few years ago. Have labs improved significantly since then?