Point-of-Care Diagnostics Benchmarking

Translation of RALS Data Into Clinical Practice

With the growing need for timely clinical data to make patient care decisions, and the importance of reporting quality indicators to regulatory agencies, hospital quality management departments want to know how well their hospital is doing in the area of glycemic control in critical illness and infection preventions and how well their efforts at achieving tight glycemic control compare to peer institutions.

Epsilon has worked with our affiliated companies, Medical Automation Systems (MAS) and Medical Decisions Network (MDN) to develop point-of-care laboratory and diagnostic benchmarking products including the RALS®-Annual Report.

The RALS-Annual Report is a complimentary service from MAS developed exclusively for RALS-Plus customers.  It is offered to hospital administrators, quality managers, and clinicians for comparison of glycemic control (the mean blood glucose results of their hospital to other participating hospitals).  Deidentified data are obtained electronically (with subscription) via a secure connection to each hospital’s point-of-care RALS server.  No manual data collection is required, and the report is generated automatically.

The RALS-Annual Report includes summary data for the individual hospital:  Mean Blood Glucose (mg/dL) levels for a given year, comparing the hospital’s point-of-care blood glucose data to other participating hospitals for:

• All Patient Glucose Measurements
• ICU Patient Glucose Measurements Only
• Non-ICU Patient Glucose Measurements

Figure 1. Sample RALS-Annual Report Charts.

The charts above were compiled using the RALS-Plus Information Management System, which has compiled glucose data from more than 130 U.S. hospitals totaling more than 11 million glucose tests. Data from participating hospitals has been de-identified to provide benchmarks that assess the performance of each hospital compared to the aggregate

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