Some other labs that have had more recent surveys from CAP or JCAHO (re:CLIA) have had the inspectors comment that a further easing of QC requirements for Hema is in the making.  It is to be more like Chemistry, where in general, only two levels of QC are required once a day.  (I believe Coag is to stay the same at 2 levels every 8 hours.) 

 

Anyone hear anything about this?  Currently we are running three levels a day 8 hours apart, with a patient control for mode-to-mode check.  We are eagerly awaiting our next JCAHO Lab guide update to see if we can drop some QC runs!

 

Scott

 

We just recently had out Joint Commission inspection.  The new QC guidelines are:

 

2 levels of commercial QC every 24 hours

This is for both primary and secondary modes. 

 

This went into effect in the first part of July.

 

We were using a patient control for the secondary mode but we were informed by the inspector that we needed to perform the secondary mode QC with our commercial cell controls.

 

We are using the Coulter 5C controls and are running all 3 levels once per day.   

Thanks very much for this response! We will be checking the latest updtae for the regs on this from JCAHO.  I knew it was coming.

 

Curently, we do the patient control thing for the open mode three times a day, along with a level of 5C in the closed mode.  It looks like we can drop down to two levels of 5C once/day, but if we do indeed have to stop using a patient control (was okayed for us on a previous inspection), we will now end up running 5C four times a day instead of 3!  So much for saving on commercial control.  At least we only have to run QC once/day.

 

Scott

you guys should thank your lucky stars you don't live in NYS - qc every 8 hours +/- 15 minutes!  we were running 2 levels every 8 hours, but we're actually saving money running 1 level every 6 hours.  one of the many nice things about the DxH800 is that there is no secondary mode to qc separately!