We are proud to introduce our new external quality assessment programme for 2021. The new product catalogue includes 11 interesting new EQA programs and a pre-announcement of 7 pilot programs. Already 6500 clinical laboratories and point-of-care testing sites globally have chosen Labquality as their primary EQA provider. Labquality provides clinically relevant EQA programs to support continuous quality improvements for the benefit of patients.
SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid detection and SARS-CoV-2 antibodies schemes were introduced as pilots already in the summer 2020. Now the design and specifications of the programs have been finalized to support all types of laboratories and testing systems. Wide international peer groups guarantee valuable information for the participants. We will add one more scheme, SARS-CoV-2 antigens to complete our program for Covid-19 diagnostics. The antigen detection scheme will be introduced as a pilot round later this fall.
Bacterial particle count with automated analyzers has been missing EQA for many years. Now it finally seems that we have found suitable sample materials to introduce an EQA program for this purpose. However the first round of 2021 is still launched as a pilot round to make the final validation.