Automated Specimen Receipt Recording to Reduce Turnaround Time of Complete Blood Count Samples

Upfront dilution of ferritin samples to reduce hook effect, improve turnaround time and reduce costs

Introduction Sandwich immunoassays offer advantages in the clinical laboratory but can yield erroneously low results due to hook (prozone) effect, especially with analytes whose concentrations span several orders of magnitude such as ferritin. This study investigated a new approach to reduce the likelihood of hook effect in ferritin immunoassays by performing upfront, five-fold dilutions of all...

The complete blood count.

Lean six sigma process improvement in specimen receiving to improve stat chemistry turnaround times

  Objective: As a consequence of stat turnaround times (TATs) chronically exceeding 60 minutes, our laboratory was facing pressure to divert limited resources toward the implementation of an emergency department satellite laboratory. Peer-reviewed literature in clinical laboratory quality assurance and improvement indicates that between 60-70% of errors occur at the pre-analytical level.  Thus...

The Effect of Pregnancy Induced Hypertension on Complete Blood Count of Newborn

  Background: Pregnancy induced hypertension is one of the most common causes of maternal and neonatal mortality and morbidity. New born delivered to mothers with hypertension are more liable for intrauterine growth retardation and may be delivered prematurely. We aimed to determine the effect of pregnancy-induced hypertension on complete blood count, gestational age and birth weight of newborn...

Identification by mass spectrometry and automated susceptibility testing from positive bottles: a simple, rapid, and standardized approach to reduce the turnaround time in the management of blood cultures

BACKGROUND Speeding up identification and antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) is of foremost importance in the management of blood cultures. Here, we describe a simple, rapid, and standardized approach based on a very short-term incubation on solid medium from positive blood cultures followed by MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry identification and automated AST. The aim of the study was to eva...