BACKGROUND An alert value is a result suggesting that the patient is at imminent danger unless appropriate remedial actions begin promptly. Report of alert values (AV) by the clinical laboratories has taken special relevance in recent years due to its contribution to patient's care. AIM To report results of AV informed during 2007 within the Health Network of the Pontificia Universidad Católi...

BACKGROUND The Strengthening Laboratory Management Toward Accreditation (SLMTA) programme is designed to build institutional capacity to help strengthen the tiered laboratory system. Most countries implement the SLMTA three-workshop series using a centralised model, whereby participants from several laboratories travel to one location to be trained together. OBJECTIVES We assessed the effecti...

BACKGROUND During the 2009 influenza pandemic period, routine surveillance of influenza-like-illness (ILI) was conducted in The Netherlands by a network of sentinel general practitioners (GPs). In addition during the pandemic period, four other ILI/influenza surveillance systems existed. For pandemic preparedness, we evaluated the performance of the sentinel system and the others to assess whic...

CHELSI is a CsI-based portable spectrometer being developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory for use in high-energy neutron fields. Based on the inherent pulse shape discrimination properties of CsI(Tl), the instrument flags charged particle events produced via neutron-induced spallation events. Scintillation events are processed in real time using digital signal processing and a conservative ...

A distributed measurement laboratory (DML) having instruments scattered in different geographic areas is proposed in this paper. Such a system allows users to practice any distributed instrumentation and simultaneously monitor it via real-time video. The system is characterized by use of object-oriented technique to integrate the scattered electronic instruments and video capture devices to for...

The human joint kinematics is an interesting topic in biomechanics and turns to be useful for the analysis of human movement in several fields. A crucial issue regards the assessment of joint parameters, like axes and centers of rotation, due to the direct influence on human motion patterns. A proper accuracy in the estimation of these parameters is hence required. On the whole, stereophotogram...

The enumeration of bacteria using plate-based counts is a core technique used by food and water microbiology testing laboratories. However, manual counting of bacterial colonies is both time and labour intensive, can vary between operators and also requires manual entry of results into laboratory information management systems, which can be a source of data entry error. An alternative is to use...

A chain of custody (COC) is required in many laboratories that handle forensics, drugs of abuse, environmental, clinical, and DNA testing, as well as other laboratories that want to assure reliability of reported results. Maintaining a dependable COC can be laborious, but with the recent establishment of the criteria for electronic records and signatures by US regulatory agencies, laboratory in...

Methods A new module in the laboratory information system GLIMS by MIPS Belgium, combines isolate resistance data with patient location data derived from the hospital information system. Antimicrobial resistance patterns of new clinical isolates are compared with previous patterns, and identical resistance patterns are checked at ward level for simultaneous patient stay. If these conditions are...

Today healthcare organizations integrate many types of clinical information systems. These systems are used to collect, manage and report patient-related data, with a goal to increase quality of patient care and clinical research. However, end user experience with these systems, in many cases, is not satisfactory [1]. This paper describes a development method and web technology which ensures mo...