Dear Colleague,

Apologies for cross posting. Your valuable professional help and knowledge is requested. If you have particular specialist knowledge please take part in this review.

You may be aware that there are mounting safety concerns about the quality standards of data being reported electronically from NHS laboratories. These are coming to light because of the increasing need to merge data from different sources into electronic patient records which are now in widespread use in the NHS. The background to these issues are explored in the attached files and more information can be found on www.ychi.leeds.ac.uk/pmipunits.

In answer to the safety concerns the DH, Connecting for Health and the RCPath have been working jointly on a project to audit the scale of the problem and to provide methods to improve the standards and their implementation in laboratory systems. Indeed, many of you may already have been working to correct minor errors in your data feeds on the basis of the audit data which was distributed earlier this year.

The next stage of the process is to seek feedback from the profession on the proposals, specifically about the units of measurement which are to be used in reporting individual analytes. 

This review is open to all national bodies and to individuals via a web interface. This provides access to the 3000 test codes currently in use and for each code it is possible to append a comment. The list is searchable so that relevant subsets, e.g. drugs, tumour markers, can be easily viewed. Review is needed from a professional, clinical and IT perspective and ultimately conformance to the standards is a matter of clinical governance.

The site is on:
http://www.ychi.leeds.ac.uk/pmipunits/Reportables.aspx (cut and paste link if Outlook give an error)

Hence, you are invited to visit the website and append any comments on the proposed Units of Measure (UoM) which will be included within the standard. In the longer term these UoMs will be merged into the National Laboratory Medicine Catalogue. If you have specialist knowledge please add you comments where appropriate

The timescale for the review is that it should be completed by 27th April 2012, following which a further national audit will be conducted. If you are a lab director or IT manager then if you have not already corrected you system configurations this might be an opportune time to do so.

Any queries should be sent to [log in to unmask]

With best wishes,

Rick Jones

Dr Rick Jones
On behalf of the NLMC Governance Board
Sen Lect, Yorkshire Centre Health Informatics, Univ of Leeds Consultant Chemical Pathologist, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust
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http://www.ychi.leeds.ac.uk/
http://www.pathology.leedsth.nhs.uk/
www.ychi.leeds.ac.uk/rgjones
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