Abstract

CARCHIO, Stella Maris et al. Aplicación de Seis Sigma en el Laboratorio Clínico. Acta bioquím. clín. latinoam. [online]. 2019, vol.53, n.4, pp.525-537. ISSN 0325-2957.

Six Sigma is a method for improvement of processes that focuses on reducing their variability. The most common approach is to count the defects, determine the percentage, convert them to a defect rate per million and then use a table to find the appropriate sigma metric. The second approach consists of using the process variation measure to estimate the sigma metric. In the clinical laboratory, both concepts can be applied according to the stage of the laboratory in which the sigma metric is intended to be used. For both approaches, a 6 sigma process is considered an efficient, high quality process. In this work, a minimum goal of 4 sigma was raised for the preanalytical stage. Some processes show good performance with quality indicators with sigma greater than 4. However, several of them have sigma lower than the proposed goal proving to be the most vulnerable. In Clinical Chemistry and Hematology, the choice of the quality requirement is the key point to harmonize the Sigma metric together with the strategy to obtain systematic and random error. This paper shows the different strategies to relate the performance based on the sigma of the analytical process with the validation rules of the analytical runs.

Keywords : Six Sigma; Clinical Laboratory; Quality indicators; Metrics.

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