Speaker #1:
Laura Smy. Assistant Professor / Director Clinical Chemistry and Toxicology. Medical College of Wisconsin / Wisconsin Diagnostic Laboratories.
Laura Smy is an Assistant Professor at the medical College of Wisconsin. ln this role, she provides direction for the chemistry and toxicology department, point-of-care testing, and two small hospital laboratories within the Froedtert Health System. Her career working in a hospital laboratory, initially as a medical laboratory technologist, has fostered her interest in quality management and implementing concepts such as Six Sigma to provide the means for continual improvement in Laboratory processes and assay results
Overview:
Six Sigma concepts can be a valuable tool for the clinical lab by aiding with assessing assay quality, devising a quality control plan, selecting a new analyzer, and improving laboratory processes. The journey to utilizing Six Sigma requires learning the concepts and how they apply to the clinical lab, which is not without some challenges. This presentation will provide an overview of the value of Six Sigma in the clinical lab, examples of the Six Sigma calculation, and outline the factors to consider with the goal of demonstrating that the Six Sigma journey is a trip worth taking for every clinical lab.
Objectives:
At the end of this activity, participants will be able to:
- Calculate the Six Sigma metric for an assay
- Describe how applying Six Sigma in a clinical lab can be valuable
- List factors to consider when incorporating Six Sigma in the clinical lab
Speaker #2:
Mark A. Cervinski, PhD, DABCC. Director of Clinical Chemistry, Associate Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, and The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.
Mark Cervinski is the Director of Clinical Chemistry and Point-of-Care at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and Associate Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, in Hanover, New Hampshire. Dr. Cervinski obtained his BS in Biology from the University of Mary, in Bismarck North Dakota, and his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Science in 2006. Following the completion of his clinical chemistry fellowship at Washing University in St. Louis, Dr. Cervinski joined the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth
Overview:
Patient based quality control techniques have the potential to provide near real-time information on assay performance, allowing for detection of analytic error far in advance of traditional QC techniques. The concept of patient-based QC for laboratory testing was first proposed nearly 60 years ago, however the field is still in lag-phase growth but may be on the cusp of an exponential increase in use and functionality. Some laboratories are already using patient-based QC techniques to catch analytical error, however patient-based QC is not a panacea and comes with important limitations. In this session I will discuss some of the various techniques currently in practice, as well as the steps taken in my own laboratory to develop and deploy patient-based QC.
Objectives:
At the end of this activity, participants will be able to:
- Determine the assay and population characteristics of an analyte that indicate where patient-based QC can be deployed for the effective detection of systematic error.
- Discuss the types of errors that are likely to be detected with patient-based Q.