The Westgard Rules

DNV Healthcare and Labs - a correction

By Sten Westgard, MS

In an earlier post about DNV Healthcare and Laboratory accreditation, I inadvertently implied that only CAP or COLA accreditation would be accepted by DNV. I should have been more precise in my listing of possible accreditation agencies for laboratories; that was a mistake on my part. I didn't intend to imply that only those two accreditations would be accepted by DNV. My apologies for my imprecise statement.

The important point is that DNV currently will not accredit labs. If you move to DNV Healthcare to accredit your hospital, you will need to have another agency accredit your laboratory.

Again, I am sorry to have given the wrong impression. Thanks to Margaret Peck of Joint Commission for alerting me to the problem. The original post has been corrected as well.

Sten

The 2008 "Westgard Wear" Raffle winners are...

posted by Sten Westgard

Every year at the AACC/ASCLS conference, we hold a "Westgard Wear" raffle, a chance for someone to win the rare, obscure, and occasionally treasured hat, shirt or messenger bag with the Westgard logo on it. (Below, you can see the staff modeling some of the items)

This year, our winners were...

• Christopher Dukes of BayHealth, Delaware
• Elizabeth Madden of the University of Washington
• Janet Means of Boston Medical Center, Masachusetts

Congratulations, winners! You now can wear something that will make "normal" people look at you and scratch their heads. Of course, we hope other people in the laboratory might think it's not so bad.

What's that on the right side of this page?

posted by Sten Westgard

As you can no doubt see, there's more than one new feature of the Westgard Blog. In addition to the new look, new features, and new organization, there are some Google AdSense text ads along the right column.

That's right, the world has ended. There is now some advertising on Westgard Web.

This doesn't mean that visitors to Westgard Web will be deluged with pop-ups, pop-unders, and other attacking ads. But it does mean that Westgard QC is continuing to look at different ways to fund the website. As we commented many years ago in the essay Quality and Commerce, it's not possible for us to give everything away. We have to find ways to generate revenue to sustain the website, to allow us to continue to add to the website's offerings.

For now, ads will be confined to the blog. We will watch and see if limited advertising in limited sections of Westgard Web enables us to sustain the website. Given the omnipresent marketing in all the other publications and events in the laboratory marketplace, we think you will probably survive the exposure to a few more ads. We continue to believe that the best policy is to allow as many people as possible to have access to the important lessons in Quality Control.

If you see an ad that is inappropriate, or most importantly, offensive, do let us know. We have some ability to block what ads Google decides to place on the blog.

As always, we welcome your comments on this. If you think we've made a major error, or broken faith with you, do let us know.

The Blog is Back

posted by Sten Westgard

Yes, the Westgard blog is back.

Regular visitors will remember that back in 2006, Westgard QC dipped its toe in the blog water, but after a dozen or so postings, the blog went silent.

It turns out, the technology we were using to run the blog was not that robust or user-friendly. And it was particularly vulnerable to SPAM, with hundreds, if not thousands, of scripts attempting to comment on the blog with links to frightening websites. That forced us to be very strict on comments so we could be certain only genuine comments could go through. The combination of these problems meant that the blog was really not usable for our purpose. We ceased posting but kept it barely alive. The revamping of the blog went on the To-Do list. Unfortunately, that list was so long it took a few years to get done.

Now, we're using a better blog platform, with more capabilities and features than before. This should allow better posting, better commenting, less SPAM, and easier navigation. (Also note, the previous posts from the old blog have been transferred over, so you still have access to the content.)

The blog is always going to me an adjunct to the main westgard website, www.westgard.com. But we'll use this to point to new articles and events, as well as make shorter comments and points about topics of interest to the laboratory community. There are a lot of issues and news stories that warrant a short note, but aren't really worth an entire essay.

In short, we hope that we'll be able to post more stuff and do it faster.

Thanks for your continued readership of the website and the blog. We hope we can continue to improve its offerings.

Don't forget to make your thoughts known in the comments.