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 ...

In 2001, Belgian professor Greet Van den Berghe, PhD, and her colleagues at the Leuven University Hospital began a small revolution with the publication of the 2001 study “Intensive insulin therapy in critically ill patients”. According to the study, tighter glucose control based on insulin therapy lowered rates of...

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.

Is it a good idea to rely on vendors to help develop training materials for point-of-care testing staff? According to the lab group responsible for point-of-care (POC) testing at the Malmö University Hospital in Sweden, vendor cooperation can help you achieve a better result, faster. However, the better prepared you ...

Neonatology, perhaps more than any other field in medicine, has undergone dramatic improvements in care over the last several decades. One of the main areas of advancement is the ability to mechanically ventilate premature infants with a variety of neonatal lung conditions. As survival of premature infants has...

Today’s blood gas sensors are the result of many years of gradual improvements and optimizations. The operating principles behind sensor technology have largely remained unchanged, even though the size of analyzers and thus of sensors has decreased remarkably.  However, miniaturization has created a new challenge: to ...

Test results are commonly interpreted against population-based reference (normal) intervals, which should be provided on every laboratory report, irrespective of whether the test has been done as point-of-care testing or in a clinical laboratory. Reference intervals are difficult to generate properly if international ...

About half of all newborn infants born at term develop jaundice during their first days of life, and the lower the gestational age the more frequent the jaundice is. Newborns develop hyperbilirubinemia because of a large bilirubin production, low hepatic excretion and enterohepatic recirculation. At birth the newborn ...

Almost as soon as healthcare providers began ventilating neonates with respiratory distress syndrome, the problem of chronic lung disease began. How to manage these children in a way to promote lung growth and disease-free survival has been the question for those involved in the care of these infants since that time....

The introduction of armband barcode scanning capabilities to point-of-care glucose testing devices has been shown to greatly reduce patient identification errors. Barcodes may be scanned to identify operators, patient identification and reagents. Barcode scanning, however, does not eliminate all errors, and in some...