New sections added to AP, cytopathology checklists

Create PDF

Anne Ford

November 2017—A new flow cytometry section in the anatomic pathology checklist and a section on immunochemistry in the cytopathology checklist are among the many changes found in the latest edition of the CAP Laboratory Accreditation Program checklists, released in August.

“I don’t believe there’s anything that checklist users will be startled by,” Checklists Committee member Michael Ross Henry, MD, director of cytopathology in the Department of Anatomic Pathology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., says of the new sections.

Dr. Henry

The anatomic pathology checklist now features a section on flow cytometry data interpretation. It applies to laboratories that perform the interpretation component of flow cytometry data where the flow cytometry technical component is performed at a laboratory with a different CAP and/or CLIA number. The new section consists of checklist requirements on peer education programs, record retention, appropriate antibodies, gating procedures, and final reports. If the technical and interpretive components are performed in the same laboratory, with the same CAP and/or CLIA number, the laboratory will continue to be inspected with the flow cytometry checklist.

Why the new section? “What we’ve found is that in the past, laboratories that were doing flow cytometry interpretation did not declare that activity to the CAP, and consequently they did not receive the flow cytometry checklist, so the inspection team couldn’t inspect those areas when they went there,” says Richard M. Scanlan, MD, chair of the CAP Commission on Laboratory Accreditation and vice chair of laboratory medicine and director of the transfusion medicine service at Oregon Health and Science University. In addition, more and more pathology laboratories are offering this type of interpretive service, and the Commission on Laboratory Accreditation was concerned it could be overlooked during a CAP inspection.

“We felt that an entire flow cytometry checklist was overkill for these laboratories,” Dr. Scanlan says, “because much of it has to do with quality of the wet testing, and that’s not an issue in a flow interpretation-only laboratory. So we took questions we felt were appropriate and we added them to the CAP anatomic pathology checklist so they could be inspected.”