Just as POC devices come in all shapes and sizes, so do their operator competency/certification requirements. Typically, employees within a central laboratory setting have an applicable level of laboratory education and certification. However, when it comes to POC testing, very few performing the testing have laboratory education or certification. And unlike the laboratory, there are significantly more people performing POC testing than work in the central laboratory.

QML was designed to automatically consolidate and manage all POC operator competencies. This includes:

• Schedules for certification of each device type, where each device type can have different requirements and schedules,
• Real-time queue of operators due for their certifications within the next ‘n’ days where ‘n’ is defined per certification profile,
• Ability for QML to automatically re-certify operators meeting their recertification requirements such that the real-time queue contains only exceptions needing action,
• Automatically send operator certification updates to devices that can accept electronic lists,
• Automatically records the number of tests performed within the previous certification period,
• Automatically records additional requirements completed through the organizations learning management software (LMS) with an interface to QML, and
• Provide an historical review of each operator’s certification activity.

The LMS interface also includes options to manage operators by automatically adding new operators and inactivating those who have left employment from the organization. Even without an eLearning interface, lists of new operators and those to be inactivated can also be imported into QML, eliminating the need to manually create/update operator records.