Jonna

We are using the Pochi-100 in our oncology satellite and also have them as an emergency backup for our elderly Coulters. They have worked great. The oncologists are most concerned with the WBC, H&H and platelets and the absolute neutrophil number. The analyzer flags the diff for abnormal cell types and the docs can stain a slide and view it quickly and/or send it to the main lab for a technologist to perform a differential. Good little machine!

We have been approached by upper management to test a product called Cortex from Xsolis. It seems that it takes data from multiple hospital sources, including labs, then use Artificial Intelligence that will make decisions on admissions and discharges and patient status changes. Sorry for the long-winded sentence!! We are not getting much information from the project managers and vendor. We are arguing that the data will be used to make clinical decisions, therefore will need to meet the CAP requirements for downstream lab data reports. Any ideas? Thank you!!

We replaced it with the PFA-100. But we do very few tests.

Does anyone have tips or warnings about using a Sysmex Pochi CBC with 3 part differential in an oncology office? We currently staff a medical technologist and have Beckman Coulter analyzer on site for 6 hours a day. We do maybe 10 cbcs a day. With the staffing shortage we are trying to think of a way to better use our staff yet still give the oncologists results they can use to treat patients Any advice appreciated! jonna

Hi All, our lab is being asked by multiple entities in the hospital to have lab results sent to other systems. We are struggling to meet the cap requirements on several of these. The most recent one is BD MedMine that wants to take lab data into Pharmacy for HAI reporting and renal dosing. We have previewed the application and find they do not meet the requirement that says results need to display any "conditions of the specimen that may limit adequacy of testing". We do this in a comment section that the MedMine product does not capture. Does anyone have any experience with these types of situations and how CAP can be satisfied. We were not consulted on the purchase of the system and are now in a hard place telling the pharmacy they cannot take labs into the system....CAP is very clear on the regulations and at this point we would not be compliant. Any suggestions? thanks, Jonna

I just looked up the CAP standard HEM.35395, thanks for the suggestion! It actually mentions methylene blue. We have always used either the acetic acid/crystal violet or slide correlation. Red Cell Confirmation Techniques Phase I There is an additional procedure beyond unstained bright-field microscopic visualization of cells on the hemocytometer used when necessary to ensure the accurate distinction of erythrocytes from other cell types. NOTE: Suggested techniques include acid rinsing of the fluid sample to lyse erythrocytes after initially counting all cells, the addition of a stain such as methylene blue to improve recognition of non-erythrocytes, correlation with the number and proportion of cells on the cytospin preparation or phase microscopy.

Yes, most of the experienced techs do not use any stain, but we offer the stain until they get more confident looking at the cells on the hemacytometer.

We currently use crystal violet in acetic acid to stain body fluid WBCs and lyse the RBS in a manual cell count. A new employee suggested we use New Methylene Blue as it stains the WBCs, but does not lyse the RBCs. Does anyone have experience with this? Thanks

We switched from the vidas to the CA1500s. The vidas takes at least 30 minutes if I remember correctly and you have to batch or can only use one side at a time. Once the Innovance ddimer for the CA1500s was approved to rule out DVT/PE we switched. Must faster, cheaper and easier to maintain. If you are doing other testing on the vidas, it may be better. We did only ddimers on them and it was a waste.

We do this at our hospital. Our rep told us that we can put them on and off for up to 2 weeks. We try to take them off the analyzer at 1 hour. We always run one level of control when we put them back on to be sure we put everything in the right place. We also change them out of the bottles and into 2ml cups when volumes get low. Once they go into the 2ml cups they stay on the analyzer for 24 hrs then they're done. We squeeze out every drop of reagent!!

We stopped doing them when the Unopettes were discontinued. We do a manual smear correlation and make any notations if the platelet estimate seems inconsistent with the analyzer count.