Biannual EPOC Correlations
Hi Everyone,
I am needing some insight on streamlining some of my procedures. A little bit of back story since I don't post on here often: I am new to the POC world. I took the POC position at my facility officially in July of last year. The position had been vacant for nearly a year after the previous POCC retired. My position is a dual role where I am POCC and lead hematology tech. Unfortunately due to staffing, my time is spent doing hematology tasks 99% of the time, so as you can imagine, my time dedicated to POC is very limited and I don't have any technical help to complete POC tasks.
I am looking to streamline how the 6 month correlations should be completed on the EPOCs. We have 7 EPOCs here....3 that just do creatinines (located in our imaging departments) and 4 that perform the full BGEM panels (located in OR, Cardiac Suites, and Cath Lab. Current policy states that every 6 months, 10 specimens should be ran on EACH EPOC and then correlated with the blood gas analyzer on the floor and the laboratory analyzers. Please tell me there is a better way?! I have difficulty rounding up all the EPOCs at one time as we don't have any spare ones in the lab to swap out.
Any help or insight to how you get this accomplished at your facility is much appreciated!
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We have around the same amount of epocs as you. We use CAP Quality Cross Check (AQQ) on each epoc to correlate to eachother at a 6 month interval. Once we have that step completed, we need to show the epocs correlate to main laboratory. To do that we use a designated instruments against eachother with AQQ and two patients samples. Our criteria of acceptability is from the CAP evaluation summary.
CAP only required PT twice a year at 3 samples. I would like to think that correlation data might mimic in number/frequency what proficiency would. Your 10 samples twice a year sounds like way more than the accreditation agency requires for proficiency.
Good luck :)