A computer program for quality control in the blood gas laboratory

In blood gas laboratory quality-assurance programs, which are routinely included with materials sold for quality control, raw data are sent to a data processing center for reduction to statistics meaningful to the laboratory's quality-control effort. This data reduction service usually requires a turn-around time of 2 weeks or more. I describe a computer program for the more timely, in-house computation of a laboratory's mean, standard deviation, and coefficient of variation. We have also found this program useful in calculating values for a new lot number of controls during the period between receipt of the controls and receipt of the first set of statistics from the data processing center. Comparing these values to the assayed values in the manufacturer's insert provides timely feedback and augments the manufacturer's professional data reduction service.