Moving Average for Continuous Quality Control: Time to Move to Implementation in Daily Practice?

摘要

To the Editor: Recently, Ng et al. described a new method for optimization of moving average (MA)1 QC procedures (1). The accompanying editorial mentioned that, during the last 50 years, slow but continuous improvements have been made in the understanding and methodology of MA in the move toward continuous analytical quality assurance (2). Although these improvements are being made, general implementation of MA for continuous QC on clinical laboratories has failed and many laboratories are struggling with the implementation and application of MA QC. In this letter, we address several steps that we consider to be important to support a more general implementation of MA as a continuous QC instrument in medical laboratories. Most improvements that really affected the use of MA in clinical laboratories originate from the 1970s and 1980s. For example, the algorithms described by Bull et al. in 1974 are still the basis of the application of MA today in most, if not all, hematology analyzers (3). Interestingly, Bull et al. stated that, because their findings were based on visual inspection of MA patterns, future MA research should focus on developing objective measures of MA performance (3). Recently, 2 methods have been described that allow more objective and realistic insight into MA performance. Ng et al. (1) described an MA optimization method that used the average number of patient samples affected until error detection (ANPed), and we reported the use of bias detection curves and a?|