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.

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...

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...

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 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...

Point-of-care testing provides rapid laboratory diagnostics close to the site of care. Quality assurance of POCT, however, requires significant resources that should be matched with improved patient outcome and benefit. Application of evidence-based medicine to POCT can critically assess the medical effectiveness of...

John Severinghaus, who recently turned 80, is one of the pioneers in the field of blood gas. To celebrate his birthday, bloodgas.org has asked him to look back on the first developments leading to the modern blood gas analyzers. The following article has also been published in Anesthesiology, The Journal of the...

Preparing for an accreditation inspection is often synonymous with carts full of paper. For some labs, though, the paper hassle associated with accreditation is now history. These labs are letting their data management systems do all the work.

The measurement of the electrolytes in blood is one of the most frequently performed measurements as the electrolytes are of major physiological importance for numerous functions of the body. Analysis of electrolytes such as sodium and potassium are performed in the traditional clinical chemistry laboratory, but are...

"Six Sigma" is the latest trend in quality management and is being widely implemented in business and industry today. Six Sigma represents an evolution of Total Quality Management (TQM), providing a more quantitative framework for evaluating process performance and clearer goals for process improvement. The...