Quality assessment of interpretative commenting and competency comparison of comment providers in China
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Yuzhu Huang
Abstract
Background
This study aimed to evaluate the ability of comment providers who were responsible for interpreting results in clinical laboratories in China and to improve the quality of interpretative comments.
Methods
Basic information and interpretative comments for five cases of 1912 routine chemistry External Quality Assessment (EQA) participant laboratories were collected by web-based EQA system in May 2018. EQA organizers assigned scores to each key phrase of comments based on predetermined marking scale and calculated total scores for each participant’s answer. Final scores and ranking were calculated according to scores of cases. Finally, we comprehensively analyzed the type of hospital and the professional title of participants.
Results
In total, 772 clinical laboratories, 1472 participants, from different Chinese provinces submitted interpretative comments. Median scores, interquartile ranges and score ranges of the five cases were 13 (11–15, 1–20), 13 (10–16, 0–20), 15 (12–17, 0–21), 7 (5–9, −2 to 14) and 12 (10–13, −2 to 18). The final scores and ranking of participants that came from tertiary hospitals were higher than those from secondary and other hospitals; however, there were no significant differences (0.774). When grouped by professional title, we found that although no significant variability existed among senior, intermediate, junior and others (0.699), it existed between laboratory physicians and technicians, as the median final scores of the former were higher than the latter.
Conclusions
Practice and quality of interpretative comments are indeed different among different laboratories and participants in China. Laboratories should train and assess the interpretative ability of personnel. EQA organizers should also improve the scoring method and establish peer assessors team through this survey.
Acknowledgments
We appreciate the UK National External Quality Assessment Scheme (NEQAS), the Interpretative Comments Educational Programme 2011 of Asian and Pacific Federation of Clinical Biochemistry (APFCB) and Dr. Gordon Challand for giving us copyright permissions of cases for this study. We appreciate the participant laboratories and institutions that participated in the EQA schemes for this survey. We also thank the personnel of the Clinet website (www.clinet.com.cn) who gave computer technology support to establish the network platform for the survey and relevant services.
Author contributions: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.
Research funding: None declared.
Employment or leadership: None declared.
Honorarium: None declared.
Competing interests: The funding organization(s) played no role in the study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; or in the decision to submit the report for publication.
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/cclm-2018-0877).
©2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Obituary
- Professor Howard A. Morris
- Editorial
- The silk road to total quality in Laboratory Medicine
- Reviews
- Moving average quality control: principles, practical application and future perspectives
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- Analysis and evaluation of the external quality assessment results of quality indicators in laboratory medicine all over China from 2015 to 2018
- A pilot study for establishing quality indicators in molecular diagnostics according to the IFCC WG-LEPS initiative: preliminary findings in China
- Quality assessment of interpretative commenting and competency comparison of comment providers in China
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Obituary
- Professor Howard A. Morris
- Editorial
- The silk road to total quality in Laboratory Medicine
- Reviews
- Moving average quality control: principles, practical application and future perspectives
- Serum α-fetoprotein in pediatric oncology: not a children’s tale
- Mini Review
- Value-based healthcare: the role of laboratory medicine
- Opinion Paper
- Advantages and limitations of total laboratory automation: a personal overview
- General Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine
- Analysis and evaluation of the external quality assessment results of quality indicators in laboratory medicine all over China from 2015 to 2018
- A pilot study for establishing quality indicators in molecular diagnostics according to the IFCC WG-LEPS initiative: preliminary findings in China
- Quality assessment of interpretative commenting and competency comparison of comment providers in China
- Lower creatinine concentration values and lower inter-laboratory variation among Swedish hospital laboratories in 2014 compared to 1996: results from the Equalis external quality assessment program
- Development of the Point-of-Care Key Evidence Tool (POCKET): a checklist for multi-dimensional evidence generation in point-of-care tests
- Analytical and clinical performance evaluation of two POC tests for therapeutic drug monitoring of infliximab
- Hematology and Coagulation
- Provisional standardization of hepcidin assays: creating a traceability chain with a primary reference material, candidate reference method and a commutable secondary reference material
- Danger of false negative (exclusion) or false positive (diagnosis) for ‘congenital thrombophilia’ in the age of anticoagulants
- Point-of-care haemostasis monitoring during liver transplantation is cost effective
- Reference Values and Biological Variations
- Evaluation of reference intervals of haematological and biochemical markers in an Austrian adolescent study cohort
- Cancer Diagnostics
- A novel machine learning-derived decision tree including uPA/PAI-1 for breast cancer care
- Cardiovascular Diseases
- Evaluation of analytical performances using standardized analytical protocols and comparison of clinical results of the new ADVIA BNP and NT-proBNP immunoassays for the Centaur XPT platform
- Infectious Diseases
- Improvement in detecting sepsis using leukocyte cell population data (CPD)
- Letters to the Editor
- The biological variation of plasma proenkephalin: data from a stable heart failure cohort
- Hemoglobin variants found in relation to HbA1c testing: high occurrence of Hb Athens-Georgia in the Northern Jutland, Denmark
- Eltrombopag interferes with the measurement of plasma total bilirubin in pediatric patients in an automated colorimetric method
- A challenging case: highly variable TSH in a mother and her two children
- Suppressing all test results in grossly hemolyzed samples: is this approach appropriate in every case?
- Prozone effect observed for heavy chain α in the serum immunofixation electrophoresis of a patient with monoclonal IgA-λ gammopathy
- Significant allelic dropout phenomenon of Oncomine BRCA Research Assay on Ion Torrent S5
- Evaluation of immature platelet fraction in patients with myelodysplastic syndromes. Association with poor prognosis factors
- Influence of temperature of transport of whole blood on plasma Cu, I, Mn, Se and Zn and Mg concentrations in erythrocytes
- Absorbent materials to collect urine can affect proteomics and metabolomic biomarker concentrations
