The development of systematic quality control method using laboratory information system and unity program.

ABSTRACT

Quality control (QC) process is performed to detect and correct errors in the laboratory, of which systematic errors are repeated and affect all the laboratory process thereafter. This makes it necessary for all the laboratories to detect and correct errors effectively and efficiently. We developed an on-line quality assurance system for detection and correction of systematic error, and linked it to the Unity Plus/Pro (Bio-Rad Laboratories, Irvine, USA), a commercially available quality management system. The laboratory information system based on the client-server paradigm was developed using NCR3600 (NCR, West Columbia, USA) as the server and database for server was Oracle 7.2 (Oracle, Belmont, USA) and development tool was Powerbuilder (Powersoft Burlignton, UK). Each QC material is registered and gets its own identification number and tested the same way as patient sample. The resulting QC data is entered into the Unity Plus/Pro program by in-house data entering program or by manual input. With the implementation of in-house laboratory information system (LIS) and linking it to Unity Plus/Pro, we could apply Westgard's multi-rule for higher error detection rate, resulting in more systematic and precise quality assurance for laboratory product, as well as complementary to conventional external quality assessment.