"Evaluating Critical Care Point of Care Testing (POCT) devices and tests in Nigeria"

Abstract

A survey was carried out on healthcare professionals in Nigeria on point of care testing in critical care. The respondents considered the glucose test as the most essential critical test followed by Full Blood Count (FBC), and then electrolytes, urea and creatinine. Blood gases ranked quite low with only 62% of the healthcare professionals considering them as a critical blood test. This was confirmed as it was found that only 31.6% of the respondents had blood gases devices in their institutions. Abbott's i-STAT was the most common POCT device used for blood gas estimation by 45% of the respondents, followed by Instrumentation Laboratories, 3500 and 4000 series (9.8%) and then by Roche's Cobas B221 (9%). From the features of blood gas devices which included price of analyser, price of cartridge, analysis time, portability, range of tests, power supply and volume of blood used, the price of analyser, was the product feature that respondents considered as most important. About one third of respondents ranked analysis time or range of tests possible as a priority specification, while about one quarter prioritised portability, price of cartridge or volume of blood needed. Power supply was the lowest ranking feature. dialysis and intensive care units, the average turn-around time

Can Prehospital Data Improve Early Identification of Sepsis in Emergency Department? An Integrative Review of Machine Learning Approaches

“…24 Use of data elements that take a longer time to result such as diagnostic tests provides accuracy in performance but may delay the time to predict. 41 Contrarily, only using insufficient prehospital data, one model may be able to deliver prediction at arrival time but with potential cost of reduced performance. Therefore, balancing performance and time to predict is necessary in clinical setting with consideration to quality and availability of data.…”