The healthcare context is characterized with new developments, technologies, ideas and expectations that are continually reshaping the frontline of care delivery. Mannion and Exworthy identify two key factors driving this complexity, ‘standardization’ and ‘customization,’ and their apparent resulting paradox to be negotiated by healthcare professionals, managers and policy makers. However, whil...

BACKGROUND Standardization of the semen analysis may improve reproducibility. We assessed variability between laboratories in semen analyses and evaluated whether a transformation using Z scores and regression statistics was able to reduce this variability. MATERIALS AND METHODS We performed a retrospective cohort study. We calculated between-laboratory coefficients of variation (CVB) for spe...

In 2010, the Japan Diabetes Society decided to introduce the National Glycohemoglobin Standardization Program (NGSP) values into clinical practice. Accordingly, NGSP Certification of Japanese manufacturers of HbA1c-related diagnostic reagents and instruments was initiated in February, 2012, through an NGSP network laboratory, the Asian Secondary Reference Laboratory (ASRL) #1. Traceability to t...

Ballot stuffing is the process of illegitimately creating a good reputation and requires a number of colluding fraudsters. With the use of an anonymising network, a single user could pose as many separate users and possibly implement the ballot stuffing scheme without the complexities of managing multiple fraudsters. In this paper we propose a framework that deals with thwarting ballot stuffing...

Performance in proficiency testing (PT) schemes is an objective measure of a laboratory’s best performance. We examined the performance of participants in two parasitology PT schemes in South Africa from 2004 through 2010. The average rates of acceptable scores over the period were 58% and 66% for the stool and blood parasite schemes, respectively. In our setting, participation in PT alone is i...

INTRODUCTION It is desirable in the interest of patient safety that the reporting of laboratory results should be standardized where no valid reason for diversity exists. This study considers the reporting units used for the extended blood cell count and makes a new ICSH recommendation to encourage standardization worldwide. METHODS This work is based on a literature review that included the ...