INPATIENT PHLEBOTOMY PRACTICES - A COLLEGE-OF-AMERICAN-PATHOLOGISTS Q-PROBES QUALITY IMPROVEMENT STUDY OF 2,351,643 PHLEBOTOMY REQUESTS

We report outcomes of requests for inpatient phlebotomy procedures fro m 683 institutions participating in the College of American Pathologis ts Q-Probes programs. Of the 2351643 phlebotomy requests analyzed, 93. 2% of venipunctures were successful, 1.6% were unsuccessful, 0.4% were partially successful, and 4.9% were not attempted by the assigned phl ebotomist. Administrative inefficiencies prevented the assigned phlebo tomist from attempting these venipunctures of which the most frequent reasons were patient unavailability (1.4%), patient transferred or dis charged (0.9%), followed by the specimen already collected by someone else (0.7%). These results suggest that performance improvement of phl ebotomy services, in general, would achieve the greatest gains by focu sing attention to specific processes associated with administrative in efficiencies identified, rather than phlebotomists' technical skills.