CRP Ultra – case study on cost and capacity savings!

CRP requests are on the rise, with a 15-20% year on year increase in test number being reported by most hospitals. This puts pressure on both capacity and budgets. The Royal Berkshire Hospital is no exception and their busy Biochemistry lab currently performs approximately 140,000 CRP tests per year.

The Royal Berks recently evaluated the Sentinel CRP Ultra kit, supplied by Alpha Laboratories, on the wet side of their OCD Fusion 5.1 analysers and have now switched to using this chemistry for routine use.

Brian Dale, the Head BMS of the Biochemistry Department at the Royal Berkshire Hospital commented, ‘We use the reliable Fusion 5.1 analysers but our previous wet chemistry CRP method had a limited measuring range, up to 90mg/L. This resulted in approximately 20% or 120 samples per day being re-run to bring them into range. We trialled the CRP Ultra kit, which has identical methodology to our old wet chemistry, and achieved an excellent correlation between methods and similar CV values’

Brian went on to say, ‘Furthermore, this kit has an extended range up to 320mg/L which reduced the re-run rate to around 3% or 20 samples per day. We estimate that the 17% reduction in re-run rate increased capacity by 20% and reduced costs by approximately 40%. In the present financial climate this has been a highly beneficial change in practice.’

CRP samples are also performed in urgent situations as well as in routine care. A knock-on effect of the improved extended range is that it allows the Biochemistry lab to hit challenging turnaround time targets for tests. Brian commented, ‘Lowering the repeat testing rate of acute samples, which often have a high CRP value, mean that the rapid turnaround time of 1 hour demanded by Accident and Emergency departments can be achieved more easily.’

This case study at the Royal Berkshire Hospital has demonstrated that the Sentinel CRP Ultra kit significantly improves the functionality of high volume CRP analysis on the wet side of the OCD Fusion 5.1 platform.

CRP Ultra is just one product in the Sentinel Clinical Chemistry range that has been recently introduced into the Alpha Labs portfolio. Please click here to request further information.