Implementing a tight glycemic control protocol in the hospital should be straightforward: Monitor blood glucose levels, assess how well they’re meeting target ranges, use the information to improve, and reap the benefits in shorter lengths of stay and lower mortality and costs. But even when hospital staff are eager to comply with the protocol, the challenge of getting the right data together can hamper hospitals’ ability to benefit from tight glycemic control, or TGC.

Michael Blechner, MD, found this out in 2006, three days into his job as director of pathology informatics at the University of Kentucky Medical Center. “I was pulled into a meeting with a nurse who needed help from the laboratory because she was responsible for monitoring glucose levels and had been doing it all by hand,” he said, speaking at the Lab InfoTech Summit in April. “Every month she was going into the electronic medical record system and pulling a random sample of ICU patients, and manually putting that data in spreadsheets.” His response is one example of how laboratories are trying to cope with, and take advantage of, the vast amount of potentially useful data that tight glycemic control programs are generating.

That more than 1,300 laboratories are using Medical Automation Systems’ RALS-Plus information management system for point-of-care testing confirms that hospitals are keen to tap into comparative data on patient glucose results—both their own data over time and the data of other hospitals with TGC protocols.

Philadelphia, for example, is a “well-RALSed region,” says Bette Seamonds, PhD, DABCC, director of point-of-care testing services at Mercy Health Laboratory, part of Philadelphia’s Mercy Health System.
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