HMS+ ACT >999 reporting

We have HMS's. With ours as an example, if Channel 5 gets 753 but channel 6 gets >999, it disregards the >999 and will make 753 as the average final answer. If both channels read >999, then the result average does display as >999. We have Telcor.  I am not seeing any setting on the instrument that will affect this.

Hi Miranda!  Do you run ACT's at the same time as an HPT test?  If so, when both channels 5 and 6 are >999 does it give you an average ACT of >999?  Mine works fine when they just run the ACT by itself, but when they run it with the HPT it won't average the two >999 results.

Yes our Perfusionists run HPT and ACT at the same time with no issues. They are treated as 2 separate tests, we haven't seen it not average the ACT when run with HPT.

Weird!  This makes me think there must be a setting somewhere.  Thanks Miranda!

Hi Angie, 

We have the same problem! We also have RALS and whenever the HR ACT + HPT are run together, if the HR-ACT reads as >999, we don't get an HR-ACT result at all. We currently don't have a way to get the HPT result to chart when this happens because they go together and then the HR-ACT has a comment saying "no value." 

Since people aren't seeing an issue with Telcor, I think this is a RALS problem as the device itself is sending all the results to RALS and seems to be more about what RALS isn't sending to the chart. 

We have a lot of other issues with the HMS too. Including QC lockout (the instruments don't have a setting for 30 day LQC frequency and thats what we're on (we have an IQCP for this) and as you know everything is manual! We have to do routine checks of the cartridge lots & QC lots because you have to enter that information separately and it can't be scanned during testing. On top of all of that, the HMSs are end of life soon and theres no replacement for them. If anyone has resolutions for this, please post!

Thank you,
Heather

We haven't come up with a solution on what to do when our HMS reach that end of life. I assume they are just going to have to rely on other ACT devices out there. I expect that to be a very rough conversion. I don't believe there is any other instrument that does the HDR and HPT testing.

Our perfusionists said they are comfortable just using the ACT unless a new product becomes available.  We currently use i-Stats to report ACT's in other departments and they are our backup analyzer for the HMS (though we've never had to actually use them).

Our HMS instruments have all been recently decommissioned, but when they were in use, our upper limit of our reportable range was 600, so anything over that reported out as >600.  We use Telcor and we were able to work with them that when QML saw the "-" it converted it to >600.  I believe they still held for us to review, but made it much easier to get the results charted.

It's really sounding like this is a RALS problem that it's unable to convert the "---" to a value.  Thank you everyone for your feedback, this is super helpful!

If RALS is saying "No Value" or giving a "---" in the result field. Ask them to pull the message and see if anywhere it says "out of range high" or anything unique that comes in the message of those that are >999. Then ask the RALS interface engineer to code in - look for "out of range high" (or whatever that unique segment may say) and send ">999" in the result field in the outbound config. We had to do this with our hemochron ACT testing. 

I was finally able to get RALS to fix this.  No more Enter/Edit tests!  Thanks everyone!