What types of quality control/quality assurance measures are practiced in your cath lab?
We monitor quality checks for our point-of-care testing equipment on a daily basis. We also perform various audits on our documentation. We use our MacLab system to query statistics on the amount of contrast and fluoro we are using on average during cases, and review for quality improvement. We have a monthly acute myocardial infarction (MI) meeting with our medical director (Mike Wilson, MD), an ED physician, the Heart and Vascular Institute, ED charge RN, and paramedics from the community to evaluate our times to treatment for acute MI patients and look at how we can improve. We follow the American College of Cardiology recommendations for door-to-balloon (DTB) times, and track these at the acute MI meetings. Our average DTB time for the period of January–June 2008 is 75 minutes. This includes a case that was transferred from an outlying hospital 40 miles away. From the time the patient hit the outlying hospital’s door to our balloon was under 90 minutes. We also have monthly morbidi
