Since the mid 1990's Point of Care Testing (POCT) has been viewed as a solution to a declared need for Short Turn Around Testing (STAT).  However, is it being utilized in a way that meets the needs of improving patient care and hospital quality assurance? What is STAT testing, why and how did it become POCT? How is...

It is more and more common that computer-based systems in hospitals are serviced or "looked after" by service engineers dialing in from remote locations.  The combination of highly computerized laboratory equipment and the emerging network technologies makes remote support a very attractive possibility. In many...

Accreditation of medical laboratory examinations in the widest sense is becoming important as a management tool and a means to create confidence in results. The International Standard ISO/IEC 17025:1999 provides the general requirements for quality management system and technical competence, but the medical...

With the increasing number of blood tests performed at the point of care (POC), it has become more and more important to perform method comparison studies, comparing new methods to the existing methods used in the laboratory (LAB). This is done primarily to ensure that uniform results are reported throughout the...

According to the Hvidovre Hospital, standardizing is a must if POCT is to run optimally. In the first article of the series "POCT setups for blood gas", acutecaretesting.org interviews the Danish hospital on how they have successfully implemented POCT.

p50 is a shorthand representation of hemoglobin-oxygen affinity. A lower p50 is protective in ambient hypoxemia, whereas increasing the p50 should be beneficial in hypoxia due to lung disease, anemia, and tissue ischemia. Despite encouraging theoretical and experimental data, it is not yet established that...

Attention to how data are handled by different groups in a hospital is important when interfacing a point-of-care testing system. Consideration of existing data handling practices and future data evaluation needs - before, during, and after installation - and careful planning in cooperation with each hospital...

If you think only private corporations can call themselves project organizations, think again. Hospitals around the world are increasingly seeing themselves as project organizations and relying on project groups to explore and implement new technologies.  Meanwhile, healthcare workers participating in these projects...

In our laboratory, we have used a combination of assay capability and the Westgard multirules as the basis of our quality control procedures. We have also used the concept of six sigma as the criterion for performance acceptability, which has allowed the identification of problem analytes and instituted improvements...

In a 1999 study, the US Institute of Medicine (IOM) concluded that 44,000 to 98,000 hospitalized Americans die each year from preventable medical errors. While the number of serious medical errors attributable to point of care (point-of-care testing, POCT) is not known, the testing environment (patient bedside) and...