QC Design
An excerpt from Dr. Westgard's address to the Conference on Quality Control of Clinical Chemistry Organized by the National Center for Clinical Laboratories, in Beijing, China. See how natural variation in test data gives rise to statistical monitoring, how statistical monitoring gives rise to multirule control (aka "Westgard Rules"), and how multirule control gives rise to operating specifications, quality planning, and practical tools.
At the Fourth European Conference Quality [r]evolution in Clinical Laboratories, in Antwerp, Belgium, Dr. Westgard charted the course of the recent developments in quality control. He covers the introduction of the original multirule ("Westgard Rules") to the introduction of the OPSpecs chart, to software-automated QC selection, to the future applications of embedded software in instrumentation and laboratory information systems.
POC devices are all the rage. But they don't do normal QC, they do "electronic QC". Just what is "electronic QC"? What does it really measure? And is it ever going to replace the real thing? Dr. Westgard provides a lucid hype-free discussion. (Preview)
Dr. Westgard takes the theory and tools of quality planning and applies it to immunoassays. This was part of his presentation to the joint meeting of UK National External Quality Assessment Schemes (UK NEQAS) for Endocrinology and the European Ligand Assay Society (ELAS) in Edinburgh, Scotland, a paper that he delivered "virtually" to the conference.
Quality is often described as a journey. Too often our efforts describe where we've been and how we arrived at the present, rather than advancing to where we need to be in the future. Laboratory efforts need to advance quality with well-defined destinations, maps to guide us to those destinations, and careful planning to provide a smooth journey. The way is revealed.