This online educational activity has been designed to meet the needs of individuals in a clinical laboratory, including healthcare professionals working as medical laboratory staff in non-waived diagnostic laboratories, technical consultants, supervisors, testing personnel, and laboratory assistants.This course examines the CLIA requirements for proficiency testing that apply to clinical laboratories and discusses ways to achieve compliance. This course explains the following proficiency testing topics: PT basics, selecting a PT provider, enrolling in PT, performing PT and submitting results, reviewing PT scores, corrective actions for failures, documentation, requirements for nonregulated analytes, quality assessment of PT, and compliance. The course includes links to additional resources.This course has been approved for P.A.C.E.® credit.
At the end of this course, the learner will be able to:

• Outline the CLIA ’88 requirements for proficiency testing enrollment and performance
• Summarize special situations that effect PT enrollment
• Comply with the PT documentation requirements
• Illustrate two common errors that can occur when submitting PT results
• Take the necessary steps when reviewing your PT scores
• Interpret satisfactory and successful PT performance
• Demonstrate the importance of investigating and resolving PT failures
• Determine when self-evaluation of PT scores is necessary
• Determine the causes of PT failures
• Prevent test system problems that impact PT performance and patient test results
• Predict the potential consequences of PT failures
• Apply the requirements for split-sample testing

This activity will take approximately 3.5 hours to complete and there are no prerequisites. A P.A.C.E. completion certificate will be issued upon successful completion of the course with a score of 80% or higher on the graded exams, and completion of the course evaluation.