Reference laboratory telephone service quality - A College of American Pathologists Q-Probes study of 545 laboratories

Objectives.-To establish the rates with which reference laboratories resolv e inquiries telephoned to them from primary laboratories and to identify re ference laboratory practices associated with higher rates of inquiry resolu tion. Design and Participants.-For 2 months, or until 50 contacts had occurred, 5 45 primary laboratories participating in the College of American Pathologis ts Q-Probes laboratory quality improvement program prospectively documented and characterized telephone inquiries they made to a reference laboratory of their choice. Participants also cataloged their own laboratory's demogra phic and practice characteristics and their reference laboratory's customer service characteristics. Main Outcome Measure.-Rates with which reference laboratories resolved tele phone inquiries. Results.-Participants characterized 11031 (78.7%) of 14017 telephone inquir ies as resolved by the reference laboratories. Ranked according to inquiry resolution rates, primary laboratories in the 90th percentile characterized reference laboratories as resolving 100% of their inquiries; those in the 10th percentile characterized reference laboratories as resolving only 54.2 % of their inquiries. The rate of resolved inquiries was significantly high er (P = .0047) for participants using reference laboratories with 24-hour c ustomer service than it was for participants using reference laboratories w ith less than 24-hour service. Most primary laboratories (80.9%) chose to m onitor 1 of 11 national reference laboratories; in this subset, median rate s of inquiry resolution ranged from 90.2% to 55.0% (P < .0001), despite no significant variation in other measured customer service characteristics. Conclusions.-Primary laboratories experience significant differences in the rates with which reference laboratories resolve telephone inquiries. The p erformance benchmark for reference laboratories is resolution of at least 9 0% of telephone inquiries from primary laboratory customers.