CAP Launches Online Quality Management System Educational Courses

Current courses focus on improved patient care, error prevention, risk reduction, and cost control

Published: Friday, October 1, 2010 - 12:29

(CAP: Northfield, IL) -- Medical laboratories and health care organizations increasingly face the challenge of needing to do more with less. Yet, the expectation of continuous high quality patient care—which includes competitively priced fees—remains high. To help meet these expectations, the College of American Pathologists (CAP) now offers a series of interactive, online educational courses designed to help laboratories enhance their existing quality management systems. The courses currently available are the CAP “15189 Walkthrough” and the “QMS Implementation Roadmap.”

These CAP QMEd Online educational courses help establish quality as a strategic business initiative and a competitive advantage. Designed to help laboratories, organizations, and health care professionals better understand how to plan and resource quality management systems, these course offerings focus on improved patient care along with error prevention, risk reduction, and cost control.

The “15189 Walkthrough” course targets laboratory quality managers, as well as medical and administrative decision makers, and focuses on the interpretation and implementation of the International Organization for Standardization’s (ISO) standard used by medical laboratories in developing their quality management systems and assessing their own competence: ISO 15189. The 15189 Walkthrough course summarizes each section of the standard, while clarifying its intent and key requirements. Information, context, and examples provided by CAP 15189 assessors illustrate how technical problems relate to more fundamental deficiencies in the quality management system.

The “QMS Implementation Roadmap” course outlines the practice steps required to build, implement, and maintain an ISO 15189-compliant quality management system. Quality managers and implementation team members benefit most from this course.

Additional courses offered in 2010 cover root cause analysis implementation, internal audit performance, and document control improvement. Courses on how to write effective quality manuals, and how to measure, analyze, and set goals with senior management join the curriculum in 2011.

Each CAP QMEd online course is user-friendly, highly interactive, and available on demand from any computer, enabling users to learn at their own pace, at their convenience.

“This interactive series in quality management systems, along with ISO 15189, provide one continuum of education to all medical laboratories committed to continual improvement,” says Marcia B. Geotsalitis, the CAP vice president of laboratory accreditation. “Major challenges in health care today involve increasing demands for patient safety, and cost containment. The CAP is dedicated to help laboratories turn these challenges into a quality strategy by offering innovative, online education that will support their goals to constantly improve performance.”

For more information, visit www.cap.org/qms.

About The Author

CAP

The College of American Pathologists is a medical society serving more than 17,000 physician members and the laboratory community throughout the world. It is the world’s largest association composed exclusively of board-certified pathologists and is widely considered the leader in laboratory quality assurance. The college is an advocate for high-quality and cost-effective patient care.