The American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) will host the Webinar “Making Smart Choices in Sample Handling and Processing: Preparing High-Quality Blood Specimens” on September 21 at 2:00pm Eastern. The webinar will last 90 minutes.

With laboratories under pressure to reduce costs by streamlining work processes, sample handling and preparation should be a prime target for improvement. There are several major considerations in this area. Does the laboratory accept serum samples, plasma or both? What types of specimens are used to validate molecular testing? And how does the laboratory manage hemolyzed samples?

The answers to these questions reflect choices that are made in the laboratory during a critical phase of the testing process—sample handling, preparation, and processing. Making smart choices during this phase of testing can increase efficiency and reduce error rates in the pre-analytical phase of testing: estimated to constitute as much as 50% of the errors made during the laboratory testing process.

The Webinar will explain how the laboratory can make those smart choices in the sample handling process, covering topics including the factors involved in producing high-quality blood specimens, reducing or managing hemolysis, using the right sample matrix (plasma vs. serum), and understanding the nuances involved in the sample handling and processing of molecular testing technologies.

During this webinar, the expert panel will explain what laboratories can do to better understand the nuances of sample handling and preparation, as well as improve the quality of specimens before they are analyzed. In addition, the webinar will outline what is new in the expanded and updated version of the Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute’s (CLSI) H18-A4—Procedures for the Handling and Processing of Blood Specimens for Common Laboratory Tests; Approved Guideline—Fourth Edition (published in late 2010). The Chair of the committee that wrote the document will discuss how laboratories can use its extensive hemolysis table to determine how hemolysis affects certain analytes and highlight other valuable information.

Source: AACC