In the majority of U.S. healthcare institutions, patient wristbands do not contain barcodes, creating a situation where patient data is manually typed into a database or point-of-care device, leaving plenty of room for error.  In light of error statistics issued by the United Kingdom’s National Patient Safety Agency...

Ever since the landmark document “To err is human” [1] was released, patient safety has been the paramount objective in US hospitals. “Patient safety” became the catch phrase and focus for all activities; a trend that was rapidly taken up by the rest of the world’s hospitals. Suddenly a new catch phrase – “lean” – ...

How to implement improvements in hospital settings within a week Jens Weirsøe is one of Radiometer's most experienced Master Black Belts in Transactional Process Improvements (TPI or kaizen). He has facilitated 90 kaizen events in several countries (USA, Japan, Germany and Denmark), in several different industry...

Laboratorians need to take ownership of errors, identifying, analyzing and reducing them, thereby increasing patient safety. A Client Services Department, customer care representatives, a service improvement coordinator, “morning report”, electronic error tracking and reporting mechanisms, point-of-care support...

Lately, everybody seems to be talking about reducing testing errors and improving patient safety. But where do you begin? The answer may be to look beyond the error itself and instead focus on what is causing it. Michael Astion, Associate Professor, Director of the University of Washington’s Reference Laboratory...

Preanalytical errors are a significant source of medical errors that can jeopardize patient safety. Proper specimen labeling practices are critical components of effective and accurate patient identification.  These variables are now considered part of the preexamination process in the newest CLSI quality system...

In 1998, Fleury Diagnostics, Brazil's most comprehensive center for diagnostic medicine and pathology with 1,600 employees and 2,500 patients a day, implemented its own system for managing documents necessary for certification and point-of-care testing (POCT) programs. The system was entirely developed in-house in the ...

Point-of-care testing (POCT) results, like other forms of laboratory data, hold potential hidden information that can be utilized to improve patient care.  The technique of extracting useful information from vast amounts of data is termed “data mining”. Technological solutions are now available to meet the challenges ...

Simple data-mining algorithms can be applied to point-of-care testing (POCT) data to document compliance of quality control, operator training and to identify potential preanalytical errors. Data can be manipulated to automate manual review and other laborious processes for identifying data trends, verifying...

What does it take to ensure an effective competency program? Acutecaretesting.org asked three point-of-care coordinators (POCC) with solid programs what makes their competencies work. Their input resulted in a list of 12 key recommendations.