RRay

Thank you for the information! Very helpful and will be passed along!

I agree, I hate arbitrary lvls for surgery. I'll see who is requesting the notification specifically and see if I can get some data to them. I know the medical director is being the messenger in this scenario. I have it a feeling it's OR docs... it's always OR docs.

@Neil Blumberg What indications are you using these half-doses for mainly? All indications? I ask because the main reason our med director wants the provider notified is that around half of our platelet transfusion is pre-procedure to meet platelet count requirements. The other half goes to our infusion center.

Our medical director wants us to document notification to provider that the product is low yield. Having to set up a trigger point for a required comment box. Problem with vitalant is they cut off all the yield tags before they get to us so there's nothing really to flag to staff that these are low yield. Its hard to expect generalists that work blood bank 1-2 days a month to memorize the codes. And to your point about cost... Vitalant is charging the same for low yield vs standard PLTs.

Anyone else using Vitalant? We do partially. Wanted to know if you've gotten any information on how frequent this low-yield supply will be? I get why they're supplementing inventory with these, but I'm having trouble getting information from my account rep. This involves a lot more than just turning on product codes for us, so putting out feelers. We're so remote I don't have a good network of other users.

I am pushing for my lab to define "lab experience" for the purpose of qualifying for job postings. I know CLIA doesn't fully define anything regarding this. Wondering if any of you have this defined at your facility? We are getting all kinds of things being claimed and it seems like HR doesn't know what should and shouldn't count. Case by case basis brings us back to the same discussion every time. My assumption is it has to be clinical in nature? What about internships/clinical rotations? Volunteer work? Paid/unpaid? Does 1 day a month for a year count the same as full-time? College research labs? Vet lab?

This was the clarification I got from AABB... so looks like at least one high/low check of the monitoring system as a whole would be wise?

Perfect! We are currently on Rees as well. We have a fridge that recommends quarterly alarm checks but that is being replaced soon and that would be the last shred of alarm check suggestion that I see. It is hard to let go of the CAP overlord since JC is so streamlined and often vague. I appreciate your anecdote!

Maybe I'm crazy (likely), but I don't see high/low temp alarm checks in AABB or JC standards.. Is this only a CAP thing? Still adjusting to the move away from CAP and trying to determine what is and isn't required now. AABB only has settings checks. JC has records checks of alarms taking place and the response to them. Am I missing something here?

My experience with safetrace is pretty poor. We switched off of it for a long list of reasons, one being the lack of audit trail, especially when it came to settings/rules changes. I can't believe it is still as popular as it is.

@BldBnker Yes, Ortho did tell us that and we have more than 4mm on each side, closer to 8-10mm. Even some barcodes that don't have the white space, say because of date/initials in the way or blood smear, will often read when the perfectly printed and clean labels will not. It's making me crazy.

@John C. Staley I totally agree and am currently in that process. We have other demo analyzers coming in a couple weeks and the first thing I'm going to do is throw on some barcodes that I know the Vision won't read. I'm very nervous though that if they don't read on other BB analyzers then I HAVE to figure this out. Vision is easy because a lot of techs have had exposure to it (at least in this general area), but that's the extent of the pros. I'm pretty tired of shipping and stock issues and generally poor customer service compared to other companies I have experience with.

I have the official conversion guide from Ortho and it doesn't recommend any specific QC apart from the general QC of the method it alludes to (the general MTS procedure manual). I mention visual inspection of cell button size in my SOP. Has always covered it in the past, but you know how it goes... Quick Reference Quide - Conversion.pdf

Reaching out as a last resort here... We have an Ortho Vision that reads patient barcodes at ~50% rate. I have opened many tickets throughout the years of having this specific Vision and never get far with trying to resolve. Completely unacceptable. 50% is a lot to manually assign. So now that we are evaluating analyzers for next year, Ortho is pressing to solve this issue but is still at a dead end with the information they can provide. Every experiment I do leads me in a different direction. Has anyone else had issues with barcodes reading on the Vision? I'll list all the information I can remember at the moment but nothing makes sense here. This is the biggest rock in the shoes of our techs and has been so for far too long. Issue is ~98% with patient labels, not usually reagents or units Brand new label printers did not increase the read % New barcode reader installed within the Vision, and later recalibrated with no change Handheld scanner and all other analyzers (even Vitros) have no issue with these labels I can print the same label on 5 different printers (old and new) and either they all read or they all reject Ortho is saying that labels we sent in for analysis are less than A-C grade in quality but they look perfect and the printers meet Zebra and Epic specs (even junky labels will read 50% of time) Tried matte and shiny tape covering the barcode as well as different heights on the tube A batch of labels that wouldn't read on our Vision were put on a demo Vision where they also wouldn't read (these labels were visibly perfect to the naked eye, no dead lines from the printer) Reached out to Zebra and they verified that label printer settings and format received from Epic are standard and within spec

Building an epic test make our send outs easier. I have a CPT code for this as 81403. My billing guy is asking for a DEX Z code. This is going to Vitalant for workup but they're not located in the DEX website. I've reached out to Vitalant directly but nothing yet. How do you have your HEAs set up to bill in Epic?