Monitoring Your Lab's Success

Thomas (Rusty) Pool, PhD

Wednesday, March 25
1:45 PM – 2:15 PM

 0.75 CME

Session Description:

Delivering success to patients in the ART setting is an accomplishment fostered by a dedicated collaboration between clinical and laboratory entities where purpose, communication and responsibilities are shared. So as a clinician moving into the post-fellowship world, how can I best understand how quality is managed in the laboratory and what tools are available to monitor ongoing success?

Essentially, all laboratories generate pregnancy and implantation data for evaluation and discussion at quality improvement meetings; but most are now implementing key performance indicators of specific laboratory measures of competence—ones generated in a consensus meeting in Vienna, Austria—and further have assigned benchmark values to these as goals for continued laboratory improvement. Further, there are now cloud-based applications available for deeper and faster graphical and statistical scrutiny of daily instrument performance to place in context with technical performance. Knowing that these can be employed, scheduling regular informative discussions with the laboratory team and understanding how the clinic impacts laboratory logistics gives a clear road-map for monitoring quality and success in the laboratory.

Session Objectives:

1. Describe the type of technical performance measurements in the ART laboratory that are key performance indicators (KPIs).
2. Articulate the difference between KPIs and benchmarks as monitors of laboratory quality.
3. Understand how clinical work flow integrates with laboratory logistics to provide sustained patient success.

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