Article: The ongoing experiment.(Readers respond)(Letter to the editor)(Report)

Clinical Laboratories of Hawaii has 15 hospital laboratory sites, 60 patient service centers, and over 900 employees located throughout the state. We have been extensively tracking spurious high potassium values on our patients for seven years.

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As you know, the pre-analytical aspects that contribute to this problem are numerous. Imagine what it was like for us. All our efforts to control or eliminate the problem had made little impact. As a result, we were drawing an SST tube as our primary specimen and an Li-Heparin plasma separator tube (PST) as a backup on every patient. If the potassium value from the SST tube was >5.1, we ran ...

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