What is point of care testing?
Medical testing performed at or at the point of care is known as point-of-care testing, or POC testing. The patient’s location is referred to as POC in this context.
Sending all samples and specimens to medical laboratories for processing involves a protracted wait for findings. This might result in time being spent in important situations or patients being treated without their care team having all of the information they require.
POC testing makes it much easier to get accurate and timely findings. Medical professionals may make better informed judgments about a patient’s treatment and care now that these data are available.
Point of Care Testing (POCT) advantages:
Point of Care Testing greatly lowers the time between clinical testing and the receipt of findings. This time is referred to as a turn-around-time (TAT). A comparable phrase, therapeutic TAT, refers to the time between when a patient is brought to a healthcare institution and when effective therapy is done in some urgent medical diseases, such as heart attacks or hypoglycemia in diabetics. Therapeutic TAT is more often employed since it provides significantly more clinical value to medical care providers.
All point-of-care diagnostic tests have one thing in common: they’re easy to use. There is, however, a distinction between tests that individuals may purchase at a drugstore and learn to use on their own and those that must be conducted by a skilled specialist within a healthcare institution (urine tests, or some complicated health parameters).
1. Primary health care facilities:
- Urine analysis,
- Pregnancy tests,
- Testing for Chlamydia
2. Pharmacies:
- Cholesterol levels,
- Pregnancy tests,
- INR (international normalized ratio), a test that measures the time it takes te blood to clot,
- Hemoglobin A1c tests, measuring the average levels of blood sugar over the last two to three months
3. Emergency medical services:
- Blood alcohol content,
- Cardiac biomarkers used to diagnose a heart attack,
- D-dimer in order to prove blood clotting,
- Acetaminophen and salicylate levels, measuring the concentration of these potentially toxic drugs.
4. Operating rooms:
- Ionized calcium levels, as well as hormone concentrations generated by the parathyroid gland, are used to monitor the gland’s function.
5. Intensive care units:
- The presence of a variety of clinical diseases, ranging from reduced lung function to renal failure, can be determined by an arterial blood test gas analysis.
- The electrolyte test determines if minerals and salts such as sodium and potassium are within normal limits.
- Lactate blood tests are used to demonstrate large amounts of lactic acid, which are most usually produced by a lack of oxygen in the cells and tissues.
Point of care cna login:
From this page, you may easily access point of care cna login. After you’ve arrived on the page, all you have to do now is provide the correct login information. On this page, you can find all of the most popular web portals. Visit the https://pointclickcare.com/products/point-of-care/ for Point of care login.
Residents’ photographs, easy entry groups, intuitive iconography, and huge, familiar scroll bars and tabs may all be found on PointClickCare Point of Care (POC) panels.
Many point-of-care tests are available in various circumstances. Here are a few things you could come across:
| TEST NAME | WHY IT’S DONE | WHERE IT’S PERFORMED | WHO PERFORMS IT | |
| Blood glucose | Diabetes screening and monitoring | A health care professional | You, a health care professional | |
| Activated clotting time | Heparin drug monitoring | Operating room | A health care professional | |
| Oxygen saturation | Assessment of oxygen delivery | Operating room, clinic, hospital | A health care professional | |
| Blood gases and electrolytes | Assessment of gas exchange, electrolyte disorders, acid-base disorder | Operating room, intensive care unit, emergency department | A health care professional | |
| Hemoglobin/Hematocrit | Screening for anemia | Clinic, hospital | A health care professional | |
| Rapid HIV | Screening for HIV | At home, clinic, hospital | You, a health care professional | |
| Thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) | Screening for hypothyroidism | At home, clinic, hospital | You, a health care professional | |
| hcg | Pregnancy testing | At home, radiology, emergency department, clinic | You, a health care professional | |
| Creatinine | Risk assessment for developing contrast-induced nephropathy (CIN) |
|
A health care professional | |
| Lipid profile | Screening and diagnosis of high cholesterol, cardiovascular risk assessment, long-term monitoring of patients already on treatment | Clinic, hospital | A health care professional | |
| Fecal occult blood | Colorectal cancer screening | At home, clinic | You, a health care professional | |
| Dipstick urinalysis | Used to screen and monitor the kidneys and urinary tract and diagnose urinary tract infections | At home, clinic, hospital | You, a health care professional | |
| Rapid strep | Diagnose strep throat | Clinic, hospital | A health care professional | |
| Prothrombin time/International normalized ratio (PT/INR) | Monitoring warfarin (anticoagulant) therapy | At home, clinic, hospital | You, a health care professional |
Hematology point-of-care devices:
Many medical subfields, including haematology, have embraced point-of-care diagnostics. POC testing equipment has become increasingly complex in recent years as medical device engineering has progressed. The POC hemoglobin meters has been a famous and helpful gadget for several decades.
When compared to a full blood count in a laboratory, however, this reveals just a tiny portion of the valuable or significant information available from a comprehensive study of the blood cells. More recently, the creation of a point-of-care full blood count analyser has become possible because to a mix of approaches and modern digital technology.
Engineers have used digital microscopy and machine vision with near-infrared spectroscopy and multiple wavelength light absorption, among other methods, to achieve this.
Read: https://www.techitop.com/health-insurance-a-significant-weapon-to-combat-the-dangerous-ailments/
POC testing devices can perform a variety of assays, including complete blood counts.
- Blood clots are assessed with prothrombin time analysers.
- For haemostatic evaluation, aPTT testing is used.
- To rule out pulmonary embolism or DVT, D-dimer testing is used.
- For trauma and obstetrics, viscoelastic assays are used.
- Heparin levels are monitored via activated clotting time testing.
- Malaria antigen testing is used to check for the disease.
POCT for research and clinical trials:
Researchers have been using more modern POCT devices into clinical studies in recent years to produce data faster than local facilities. Rapid CBC testing is one of the most common uses of POCT testing in clinical studies. In only a few minutes, researchers can have quantitative CBC data.
Rapid CBC testing has been used in clinical studies for the following reasons:
1. Detecting anemia in participants:
Red blood cell, hemoglobin, and hematocrit levels are usually included in a fast CBC test. If any of these values are low, it may suggest that the person has anemia. A fast CBC test can swiftly establish the existence of anemia in clinical studies involving anemic patients.
2. Detecting if people have blood problems:
Other blood abnormalities can also be detected promptly utilising a fast CBC test, much like anaemia. Autoimmune diseases, bone marrow disorders, leukaemia, lymphoma, myeloproliferative neoplasms, myelodysplastic syndrome, sickle cell disease, thalassemia, and cancer that has spread to the bone marrow are some of the conditions that can be detected.
3. Infections screening:
A fast CBC test can swiftly identify people with infections in clinical trials to discover better treatments for immunological diseases (high or low WBC count). This implies that infected people can get life-saving therapy right away. Researchers can pinpoint the fundamental cause of diseases faster if they discover them quickly.
4. Observing patients’ reactions to medications in clinical trials (companion diagnostics):
Patients’ responses to clinical trial medications can be monitored by rapid CBC testing after therapy. Researchers can swiftly discontinue medication if patients are experiencing severe side effects thanks to periodic CBC testing. Frequent CBC testing can help increase patient adherence by revealing patients who are not adhering to their treatment plan.