News

The EA LC Working Group (WG) Health Care met in Skopje, North Macedonia, on 5-6 December with 45 participants.

First, a half-day workshop was held regarding challenges encountered in the transition of accreditation of medical laboratories to EN ISO 15189:2022. The outcome of the 7 working groups will be used for coming meetings of the WG.

During the regular meeting, several items were presented and discussed:

• The work for the creation of the guidelines EA-4/20 for point-of-care-testing (POCT). The guideline EA-4/20 is out for comments in the working group until the beginning of January 2025;
• The gap analysis of EA-4/17 for the presentation of the scope of accreditation of medical laboratories for review when considering requirements of the new EA-2/15. No further update is needed at the moment;
• The guidelines for Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) were created as a draft document under the New Work Item Proposal of the EA LC. The guideline for NGS is transferred after the second round of comments in the WG to the EA LC for further treatment and comments.

In addition, participants discussed several questions such as concerning, metrological traceability, validation and verification issues, and reporting of results. New periodic work items that may be discussed in the WG are related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) used in medical analysis.

The longtime convener of the WG, Rolf Straub, SAS (the Swiss NAB), convened his last meeting and handed over the lead to Hélène Méhay, COFRAC (the French NAB). She will start her term at the beginning of 2025.

EA thanked Rolf for the pleasant cooperation and his outstanding work as convener of the EA WG Health Care.