labgirl153

Yes...we've seen this phenomenon at our facility as well. Am not certain if it's a problem with centrifugation or if it could be remedied by pre-spinning the gel cards prior to use. I vaguely recall some facilities having pre-spun the cards on receipt but never got an explanation of this practice. Upon getting a positive reaction on the 3-cell screen, I always set up a new card and repeat prior to running a panel to avoid this problem. Have not seen anything from Ortho to suggest that others have this problem and/or explanations to this.
Also...I like the Immucor cells myself, and do often reduce them to 0.8% and run them in gel as you do ... does Immucor sell 0.8% panels? If not, they should...have found their cells to have a stronger antigen expression than the Ortho cells.

Have used Meditech (current facility), Cerner classic, Cerner mill, Sunquest, HCLL. 
 
- Cerner classic despite its primitive look is quite good. No longer supported however. Easy to branch from one function to another. Can see essential info on patient quickly w/o needing to dive through a maze (unlike meditech) to retrieve info. Very handy in emergent cases. Many faciities hang on to it for these reasons despite lack of support now.
 
-Cerner Mill is quite different. Takes a day or so to get acclimated to the icons but is quite good as well and handy in all sorts of situations, esp. with emergent cases. One can turn off/on features for individuals too if the screen gets too busy with icons. 
 
-HCLL might be okay if properly programmed, but it was a nightmare at one facility where the techs programmed it instead having professional programmers build it; therefore it crashed often, was slow, illogical, circuitous and in general made everyone want to scream and hate coming to work. Horrible for emergent cases.
 
-Sunquest: Have worked off/on with Sunquest/Misys/Sunquest again for years. Used to love it back in the old days. New GUI was fine too but haven't worked with the newest iteration so am not sure why it suddenly is frowned upon by some. 
 
-Meditech: NOT impressed with the BB functionality. Maze-like to getting essential info. On looking up an accession, must scroll endlessly to find exactly what was performed. The screen info is very primitive in its presentation. Everything is run together as though it had been programmed by a high schooler on DOS steroids. It's fine with routines but there are coding issues and as everyone knows, the $$ is often not there to address those issues, or there is $$ but it's directed elsewhere.

Have used Meditech (current facility), Cerner classic, Cerner mill, Sunquest, HCLL. 
 
- Cerner classic despite its primitive look is quite good. No longer supported however. Easy to branch from one function to another. Can see essential info on patient quickly w/o needing to dive through a maze (unlike meditech) to retrieve info. Very handy in emergent cases. Many faciities hang on to it for these reasons despite lack of support now.
 
-Cerner Mill is quite different. Takes a day or so to get acclimated to the icons but is quite good as well and handy in all sorts of situations, esp. with emergent cases. One can turn off/on features for individuals too if the screen gets too busy with icons. 
 
-HCLL might be okay if properly programmed, but it was a nightmare at one facility where the techs programmed it instead having professional programmers build it; therefore it crashed often, was slow, illogical, circuitous and in general made everyone want to scream and hate coming to work. Horrible for emergent cases.
 
-Sunquest: Have worked off/on with Sunquest/Misys/Sunquest again for years. Used to love it back in the old days. New GUI was fine too but haven't worked with the newest iteration so am not sure why it suddenly is frowned upon by some. 
 
-Meditech: NOT impressed with the BB functionality. Maze-like to getting essential info. On looking up an accession, must scroll endlessly to find exactly what was performed. The screen info is very primitive in its presentation. Everything is run together as though it had been programmed by a high schooler on DOS steroids. It's fine with routines but there are coding issues and as everyone knows, the $$ is often not there to address those issues, or there is $$ but it's directed elsewhere.

Did you test either of them with O Neg cord cells just out of curiousity? I've always wanted to find one of those antibodies but never have.
Oh and as a side note Brenda, whereas I'm not saying to disregard odd occurrences that happen frequently in a short span of time, I have to admit that I've come to realize the weird ironies in immunohematology. Last year we had two different patients on the same day who both had positive antibody screens, positive auto-controls, positive DATs and anti-e identified in the eluate - both patients were phenotyped to be e-positive. Both required transfusion.
Further investigation revealed that one patient had a warm auto with e-specifity, oncology patient. The other was a sickle cell patient with an e-variant phenotype.

Truman Medical Centers in Kansas City, Missouri is a smallish hospital (350 beds) but we get about 30-40 traumas per month which makes us "hoppin". Techs are generalists and rotate between Chem, Hemo, BB, and Micro (set-up). We currently have openings. Go to trumed.org and click careers. Let me know if you apply so I can make sure the ball doesn't get dropped in HR.

When you use a indirect antiglobulin test for your weak D testing, it can not be negative when your DAT is positive. Only when your DAT is very weak, on the edge of detecting, maybe the weak D test can be negative but this is a very smal change

We are currently using some BioTest antisera (Rh and Kell). We were using their Anti-S, but now only use it for screening after false negatives were found and confirmed by DNA. BioTest has not been able to resolve the discrepancies.