New Extended Quality Control Software for the DL2000 Data Manager

In late July, Beckman Coulter released the DL2000 Extended Quality Control (EQC), a new software module designed for use on its DL2000 Data Manager.

EQC is optional software that provides advanced Quality Control functionality through additional rules and graphic analysis tools to utilize a statistical technique called patient moving averages.

The software enables clinical labs to use normal patient test results as an additional monitor of system stability in between quality control runs. It achieves this through two statistical methods, the Moving Average of normal results and Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA).

"EQC Software enables DL2000 customers to make timely, informed decisions about suspending or continuing the system’s auto-validation feature," says Margie Schmidt, product marketing manager for Beckman Coulter’s Automation Information Systems.

EQC software can be programmed to alert the operator of potential unstable system performance. It can automatically stop validating test results by electronically disabling test validation rules and stop the automatic test programming of an instrument exhibiting unstable performance, thus helping labs avoid generating inaccurate patient results. EQC also enables the operator to evaluate data across instruments, across control levels and during a defined time interval—all on a single chart.