Home >> Tag Archives: Point-of-care testing/guidelines/standards

Tag Archives: Point-of-care testing/guidelines/standards

People, partners, and platforms at the point of care

September 2023—Point-of-care testing—the requests and the committees that oversee them, the connectivity, what AI might bring. CAP TODAY publisher Bob McGonnagle on July 21 met online with a laboratory operations director and a medical director from large health systems and with company representatives for a look at where things stand today. Their conversation follows.

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Views on point of care versus core and more

February 2023—Point of care or core lab? An old question but a new conversation, this one on Jan. 12 between Stan Schofield, Brian Durkin, and CAP TODAY publisher Bob McGonnagle (asking the questions). Here’s what they said about that and health care economics, autoimmune testing, tube supplies—and, of course, the labor shortage because it affects nearly everything in health care.

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How close to patients? Cost, quality, competition

July 2022—Point-of-care versus centralized testing, and automation, IT, and staffing. It all came together as industry executives and a laboratory director and a former medical director met with CAP TODAY publisher Bob McGonnagle on May 25, as CAP TODAY’s list of chemistry and immunoassay analyzers was going together. “I don’t worry much about the machines or reagents,” thanks to good-quality practices, said André Valcour, PhD, MBA, DABCC, of Labcorp, who noted the real focus is quality of information and information transfer. Susan Fuhrman, MD, formerly of OhioHealth, said, “We should always give our clinicians as much information as we can accurately produce and our reports should be as clear as we can make them.” And of the staffing crisis: “We have a perfect storm,” she said. Here is more of what they and the others had to say.

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POC panel talks diabetes care, data management, CGM

March 2020—Data management, diabetes care, the demand for continuous glucose monitoring, and device cleansing were up for discussion when CAP TODAY publisher Bob McGonnagle led a point-of-care glucose testing roundtable in January. Joining him were Todd Cullen of Arkray, Corinne Fantz, PhD, DABCC, of Roche, and Susan Fuhrman, MD, of OhioHealth Laboratory Services. Here is what they said.

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Personnel paradox and more: POC pitfalls

November 2019—Point-of-care testing makes up only about 10 percent of all laboratory testing but the aggravation factor and number of people involved far exceeds that, said Deborah A. Perry, MD, medical director of pathology at Methodist Hospital in Omaha, Neb., speaking at CAP19 and calling POC testing “a whole different world.”

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Mass casualty plan puts point-of-care testing in the ED

May 2019—If a mass casualty event brings patients to Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., clinical laboratory staff will head straight to the bedside. Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital is a level-one trauma center. Its new mass casualty response plan, two years in the making, has laboratory staff in the emergency department and triage areas, where they will perform point-of-care testing for frontline providers.

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POC glucose: views on volume, critical care, ACOs

April 2018—Test volume, limitations on devices used in critical care, consolidation, and population health is what CAP TODAY asked about when it spoke in March with the makers of three bedside glucose testing systems. Their systems and those of two other companies are profiled on pages 44-49. “The customers are more aware than ever of the limitations that are in the package inserts from the glucose manufacturers,” says Corrine Fantz, PhD.

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Devices, decisions: POC glucose in the critically ill

January 2018—Using point-of-care glucose meters in critically ill patients can feel like tiptoeing through a regulatory minefield. Perhaps your preferred meter hasn’t been cleared by the FDA for use in this population. Or maybe you’re not sure which assay performance requirements should be regulating the performance of your meters. Or perhaps you’re still trying to define “critically ill.”

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Making a smooth pivot to point-of-care IQCP

May 2016—Practically speaking, there’s a limit to the number of balls a human can juggle. And there’s probably a limit to how complex a quality control plan a point-of-care testing coordinator can handle. Last year, many POC coordinators felt that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would be pushing that limit pretty hard with its new Individualized Quality Control Plan.

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IQCP without agony at the point of care

April 2016—For many point-of-care testing coordinators, the prospect of developing Individualized Quality Control Plans is far from enticing. But there has never been much chance that laboratories could opt out of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ new quality control framework for much of their nonwaived testing.

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Pressing questions in POC glucose testing

April 2015—Sometimes major changes to a health care organization’s point-of-care testing system come from powerful regulatory agencies in Washington, DC. Or they may arise when a child with diabetes objects to frequent venipuncture. In either kind of case, experts say, pathologists and laboratory professionals must form strong relationships with clinicians and build structural foundations to help them meet these and other demands.

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Dropping the ball on critical value POC glucose results?

December 2013—Prompt reporting of critical laboratory results is considered an important patient safety goal. But for one of the most commonly performed tests, point-of-care glucose, there has been limited information about how critical results are handled. A new CAP Q-Probes study finds there is a great deal of variability. In addition to having widely differing critical result cutoff values, many laboratories are not repeating critical POC glucose test results for verification despite the relative high rate of erroneous results on first measurement.

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An uneasy dance with POC glucose in the ICU

October 2013—Too much of a good thing can be wonderful,” Mae West famously said. And some feel our culture of excess reflects that value. Perhaps as a reaction there has been a surge of interest recently in the embrace of “enough” as a worthwhile goal. But when it comes to precise measurement of glucose values in the intensive care unit, the often-warring needs for speed and accuracy make the issue a critical matter of patient care. For point-of-care glucose testing in the ICU, how much precision is “enough”?

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Missing transcripts, diplomas snag labs

April 2013—The paperless office may be just around the corner, and virtual reality may lie ahead too. But for the time being, when it comes to demonstrating that personnel have the required educational qualification to perform nonwaived point-of-care testing, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the CAP have a message for laboratory directors: Primary documents are king. For accreditation under CLIA, it’s not enough to know personnel are qualified because of their certificate or license; you have to prove it with copies of their transcripts and diplomas.

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