A-179 Improving specimen labeling errors in the pediatric emergency department at a tertiary care hospital
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Specimen labeling errors, such as unlabeled, mislabeled, or sample-requisition mismatches, pose risks to patient care. Correcting these errors, particularly for pediatric patients, is crucial to avoid unnecessary stress to the family and time spent on follow-up. In 2018, the BCCH Emergency Department (ED) reported the highest labeling error rates among all departments at our tertiary care hospital, accounting for approximately 30% of all errors. Methods To address this issue, a quality improvement project following the Model for Improvement framework was initiated in 2019 at the ED. An interdisciplinary team approach was adopted initially, and a positive patient identification system (PPID) was implemented later in February 2022. Patient Safety Learning System (PSLS) data from January 2019 to November 2023 were analyzed to evaluate the impact of these interventions. Results 1763 (22.6%) of the 7802 PSLS events recorded during this period were sample labeling errors. Ward collections accounted for the majority of labeling errors compared to laboratory collections (20.3% vs 2.4%). In the ED, most of the labeling errors occurred with unspecified samples (25%), swabs (24%), urine (23%), and blood culture (19%). The interdisciplinary team intervention initially reduced labeling errors, but its impact was inconsistent. However, the implementation of PPID in 2022 led to a significant and consistent decrease in labeling errors in the ED (4.51 errors/month vs 1.14 errors/month; p = 0.01) (Figure. 1). Conclusions While the implementation of PPID has notably improved labeling errors in the ED, complete elimination remains challenging. In addition, more specific PSLS filing categories are needed to capture sources of labeling error from unspecified samples. Continued efforts are necessary to achieve the goal of zero labeling errors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".