DESIGN AND ASSESSMENT OF AVERAGE OF NORMALS (AON) PATIENT DATA ALGORITHMS TO MAXIMIZE RUN LENGTHS FOR AUTOMATIC PROCESS-CONTROL

Achieving high quality and high productivity crith automated testing p rocesses will require process control systems that are optimized for t he necessary error detection, minimum false rejection, and maximum run length. This study investigates whether run length could be monitored by average of normals (AON) algorithms that truncate the patient test distribution and estimate the average of a suitable number of patient results. The design of AON algorithms for individual analytes is faci litated by computer-simulated power curves that consider the ratio of the population biological variation (s(pop)) to the test method variat ion (s(meas)), represent a range of s(pop)/s(meas) ratios from 2 to 15 , and include numbers of patient test results from 10 to 600. The pote ntial applications of AON algorithms are assessed for 38 tests whose q uality requirements represent the total error criteria from the Ontari o Medical Association Laboratory Proficiency Testing Program, s(pop)/s (meas) ratios from 0 to 32, critical systematic shifts from 0.02 to 10 .85 s(meas), and test workloads representative of a regional reference laboratory. Approximately half of these tests provide high potential for applying AON algorithms to monitor run length.