[Histonet] Process improvement monitors

[John.Sheppard <@t> Health-Partners.org]

Hello "Histonetters",
      Once again I am on a "mission" for my medical director.  I am hoping
to find out if anyone out there has been looking at quality management /
process improvement areas in histology / pathology labs in their community
hospitals.
      We are currently reworking our P.I. program, and we are looking at
some of the most obvious errors we find. It seems to us that many mistakes
come to our lab from doctors offices, the O.R. and our birthing center.
These errors come in the form of incomplete or no requisition,
discrepancies between specimen labels and requisitions, and no or
incomplete label on specimens.  These are the issues that are of particular
interest to my director.  We are trying to establish a reasonable range to
strive for.  Ideally we would like to have all specimens labelled correctly
with the correct reqistion and full clinical history / diagnosis coming in
to our lab, but realistically we are not sure if that is possible.
      If anyone has reviewed these monitors and does not mind sharing their
information, we would greatly appreciate using it for comparitive data
purposes.  We have been monitoring this for a couple of years and we do not
have a sky high rate, but it is higher than we believe it should be.
Thanks again
John Sheppard HT(ASCP)
      P.S. If anyone has ideas on how to improve this performance,  short
of firing nuses everytime they mess up please let me know ?  (this is a
joke)




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