Has anybody used the new Ortho Fetal Screen II? Any opinions, pluses or minuses vs. Immucor's?

We are using Ortho's fetal screen II. We have had no problems so far. When we first went with it, we continued to run the Immucor test as well (until our contract ran out). We had no problems between the two. Our main reason for switching was cost.

We have seen no difference between the 2. Both work well.

We just finished our in house comparison and are also using both until our contract with Immucor runs out. I like the Ortho one better, the pos control is much stronger and the field count is smaller if you read the interpretation part. The techs like it because it takes less time to count that way.

We would like to try it, but price is an issue. It may be the same per test, but when the kit is twice the size, it isn't going to work for us. We don't have the volume to justify it.

After the way Ortho handled the recall on their last FS Kit they would have to give it to me before I would consider using it.

We are comparing Ortho's Fetalscreen II kit with Immucor's FBST kit. We decided to go with Ortho's kit due to price. The test method is similar to Immucor's, only 5 fields to review using Ortho's kit instead of 9 fields using Immucor's FBST. I do remember the way Ortho left us hanging when they pulled the last FBST kit, the other reagent manufacturer has its problems with reagent recalls.

We compared Ortho's kit to Immucor when we had the last CAP survey. We got positive with Immucor, and negative with Ortho on the sample with a negative KB. We are planning to switch to Ortho, but must do a more thourough comparison. Since we only do about 5-10 patient's a month, positive's are very rare.

Does anyone have a formula to make positive samples for testing?

We have no intention of using PBS as Immucor recommends. This would increase the cost of Immucor's kit over Ortho's

Edited February 17, 201015 yr by GilTphoto

We had similar results as GIT on last PT. We have switched to Ortho in spite of former problems with handling of recalls because of the false positive results we were getting with Immucor and their seemingly lack of concern. We have only been using Ortho since Jan. so we are monitoring the false positive rate.

We just finished our in house comparison and are also using both until our contract with Immucor runs out. I like the Ortho one better, the pos control is much stronger and the field count is smaller if you read the interpretation part. The techs like it because it takes less time to count that way.

We did an in house comparison and got the opposite results. Immucor's positive control was much stronger. Ortho's procedure states to centrifuge for 15-45 seconds. We found that if you centrifuged for only 15 seconds the postive control was negative. We had to centrifuge for 45 seconds and then it was a weak positive. We also did the CAP PT with both Ortho and Immucor and got the same results with both but Ortho's had to be centrifuged for 45 seconds.

My techs prefer Immucor so we will stick with it.

Has anybody used the new Ortho Fetal Screen II? Any opinions, pluses or minuses vs. Immucor's?

We did a study comparing both and the staff did not like the Ortho product. The pos control was very weak and not what they have been used to.

We have evaluated, correlated and validated the Immucor and Ortho Fetal screen kits. The Immucor Kit is overly strong for the positive control, usually finding all the rosettes you need in one field. Whereas the Ortho kit pos control has been equivalently representative of a small bleed in a patient, and therefore more realistic for comparison.

We have had several false positive results with the Immucor kit, going so far as to being part of the 17% of participants that had falsely reported a Proficiency sample as being positive, when the intended result was negative for one of the two analytes on a Proficiency from API (due to the poorly performing Immucor kit). Immucor blamed the saline used for the "false positives," stating we needed to use PHIX buffer to correct "our" problem. However, the package insert makes no mention of the PHIX buffer, and that is a shady suggestion at best in my opinion to cover their bad product. I am switching to the Ortho Kit that has validated absolutely perfectly. If you are having trouble with the Ortho kit, perhaps your centrifuge calibration is not what it needs to be because we have been using it with a 15second spin and it is working just fine for us. The G-force matters rather than the RPM. The real positives were positive, and the real negatives were negative with the Ortho kit. Staff even commented how much better they like the Ortho kit, citing it was more realistic to the patient testing.

Positive control is stronger, less fields to read, and the reactions appear cleaner than Immucor. Did anyone notice how unique the dropper is?