COMMUNITY-BASED TESTING
Stand behind your screening program
Point-of-care testing is an exciting field that is growing fast. Advances in technology have made many routine laboratory tests more accessible to patients and more cost-effective for healthcare providers. While convenience is certain, there are often questions raised surrounding the quality of these tests: Are the results accurate? Can they be relied upon to make informed clinical decisions?
CEQAL offers a variety of services to ensure your community-based test results meet or exceed the level of accuracy found in some of the world’s best laboratories. We can work with you to identify and correct a particular problem or create a comprehensive quality control package from the beginning. Contact us to learn more.
See what we did for the Diabetes Integration ProjectInstrument evaluation
The first step to ensuring high quality test results in the field is to check the performance of your point-of-care device. Using CEQAL samples, we can provide a thorough assessment of the precision and accuracy of your results and confirm that your instrument meets manufacturer’s specifications. If you haven’t yet selected an analyzer, we can also provide you with recommendations based on the objectives of your program.
Operator training and competency assessment
In community-based testing, operators are often general health professionals untrained in laboratory procedures. As such, they can unknowingly introduce variables that may affect the accuracy of your results. CEQAL provides training programs to teach point-of-care operators the essential knowledge and techniques that your test requires. We can also assess operator performance intermittently using our accuracy-based samples for verification.
Quality control samples
Beyond verifying instrument and operator performance, CEQAL samples are powerful tools for confirming the accuracy of your testing initiatives over time. With them, we can design an Internal Quality Control (IQC) program with simple data management tools to manage the quality of your tests from day-to-day. We can also provide blind, External Quality Assessments at intervals to independently audit the accuracy of testing and make any corrections as needed.
Post-analytical correction
By calculating the degree of variation from the true answer (or target value), it becomes possible to apply a correction to a given test result post-analytically. This allows us to eliminate calibration bias and harmonize testing throughout an entire network of community-based screening sites. The net effect is clean, accurate data you can trust.
Performance reports
CEQAL provides feedback to all clients in the form of detailed performance reports. Upon successful completion, we can also provide documentation that you have participated in a CEQAL community-based quality control program and have met the performance criteria as outlined. This lends credibility to your initiative and proof that your tests are of the highest quality.