Introduction Patient-based real-time quality control (PBRTQC) is an attractive addition to a laboratory's quality assurance program. However, implementation for clinical chemistry analytes has been lacking. To assist with broader implementation, provided is PBRTQC protocols from a large hospital laboratory along with over 7 years of tabulated experience. Materials and methods PBRTQC was initialized and monitored for 17 clinical chemistry analytes utilizing Data Innovations middleware. Gathered results include total alerts, true alerts, and true alert rates by year and analyte. Results Overall, there were 623 total alerts and 160 true alerts resulting in true alert rate of 25.7%. The true alert rates ranged from 0 to 100%, depending upon the analyte. Conclusions PBRTQC provides a low/no cost tool providing real-time detection of systemic bias. Implementation assists the laboratory in providing high-quality results.
McShane et al. (Mon,) studied this question.