The Westgard Rules

What's New: October 2013

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

Here's what's new on Westgard Web this month:

Could this QC get you fired?

One of our readers submitted a very interesting scenario: a mysterious discrepancy between the instrument records and LIS records of QC values. Do you think you can solve the case of the "out-and-in-control" QC?

Is this QC sending you to repeat or redundancy?

---

Three POC glucose devices for the neonatal ICU

As part of our continuing series of evaluations, we take a look at  three point-of-care (POC) blood glucose meters (BGMs). We examine the results of a paper that studied BGM use in a specific critical  setting: the neonatal intensive care unit

Should we totally go to the max with Total Analytic Error?

---

Albumin Quality: Can any method hit the mark?

Continuing with our series examining quality requirements and goals and the performance of different methods, we set our sites on albumin. We examine the different goals offered for albumin, and evaluate what methods are capable of achieving.

Can any method hit the target for Albumin?

 

PLUS!

Dr. David Burnett's new book: A practical guide to ISO 15189 in Laboratory Medicine
 

Thank you, New Orleans!

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

Westgard and Westgard had an excellent time down in the "Big Easy." We had the honor of presenting at the Quality ConFab, where Robert Michel delivered the bad news: there's no "big easy" in the laboratory's future. In fact, it's most likely that the financial straits for the laboratory are only going to get harder.

While the ConFab is often dominated by efficiency experts and consultants, this year placed a greater emphasis on the Quality part of the Quality ConFab. The truth is, most labs have been "leaned" until they're skeletal - there's no more staff to cut, the budgets are smaller than ever before. And many labs have installed tracks and automation and plenty of informatics. Alas, we're seeing the Red Queen effect - you must keep running as fast as you can, just to try and keep up. As quickly as labs are able to achieve a new level of productivity, the healthcare economy demands even more from them.

Part of the solution means returning to a long-neglected process at the core of our mission: the analytical quality of our testing. We can make our tests cheaper, we can run them faster, we can report them through informatics faster still, but if the result is still just a wrong number, we're not saving any time, money or effort. Instead, we're only creating more failure demand. We need to make sure we get the right quality right the first time.

The Affordable Care Act, as well as healthcare "reform" (or austerity) efforts all over the world are putting such pressure on labs that the essential quality of the testing process can no longer be ignored. We're happy to see the Quality ConFab bring this issue back to the heart of the laboratory debate.

 

Six Sigma Bali

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

For those who can't make Dr. Westgard's lecture in Lima, Peru, there is another opportunity the day before, in Bali, Indonesia.

Sten Westgard will be part of a Six Sigma workshop on October 29th, at the 13th Asia-Pacific Federation for Clinical Biochemistry and Laboratory Medicine Congress (APFCB).

Full disclosure: this workshop is sponsored by Abbott Diagnostics.

For those already registered or those considering registration, we invite you to attend an hour-and-one-half long presentation on the basics of Six Sigma and its application to the laboratory.

Halloween COLABIOCLI

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

On October 31st, in Lima, Peru, at this year's COLABIOCLI (the Latin and South American Clinical Chemistry convention) Dr. James O. Westgard will be giving a lecture:
"Control de Calidad en Laboratorio Clínico" with Dr. D. Mazziotta of Argentina

Translation: I can't think of a scarier topic to have on Halloween: statistical quality control.

For those who are registered or thinking of registering, we invite you to attend this lecture.

Inside Track at CLP

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

Just a short note:

Clinical Lab Products has posted an interview with me on the Sigma-metric Approach to QC:

http://www.clpmag.com/technology/24463-inside-track-sigma-metric-approach-to-qc