Identifying and assessing variations in the total testing process will provide opportunities to improve clinical laboratory services. As previously discussed in the section about nonconforming events (NCEs):
- Incident reports describe a variation in process and, from that report, opportunities for process modification to improve patient safety will be identified.
- Complaints from patients, clinicians, and other health care practitioners provide similar information to make improvements in clinical laboratory services.
- Outliers identified in turnaround time studies provide valuable information with respect to breakdowns in processes.
Instead of disregarding any outliers as aberrations, use them as opportunities to examine how they occurred and identify methods to reduce those types of errors in the future.
