SOFT 2004 Meeting Abstracts - Society of Forensic Toxicologists

F14
AUTOMATED APPROACH TO NON-NEGATIVE SPECIMEN LIST (NNSL) PRODUCTION
AND APPLICATION FOR SAMHSA-CERTIFIED LABORATORIES.
William N. Bennett and Anthony Wu* - ACL Laboratories, West Allis, WI.
SAMHSA-certified laboratories are required to produce a Non-Negative Specimen List (NNSL) for the
National Laboratory Certification Program (NLCP) on a semi-annual basis. This list must be submitted to
the NLCP staff Research Triangle Institute (RTI) on a specifically formatted Excel spreadsheet. From the
list, NLCP staff select those specimens whose documentation are to be reviewed by inspectors at the next
scheduled on-site inspection. For ease of review, as mandated by the inspection guidelines, these
documents must be organized in a manner that reflects the selected NNSL. To decrease the time needed to
compile this information, we have designed an approach to automate this organization process. Our
application of this approach uses SQL and Turbo Pascal computer languages and the spreadsheet Excel,
with Commercial Lab as the Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS). First, SQL queries are
run which produce text files from resident databases on the LIMS. Second, the text files are moved to a PC
and imported into pre-formatted Excel worksheets, which are then forwarded to RTI. Third, the files are
refined using a Turbo Pascal program and imported into Excel calendar worksheets. Calendar entries
include: Access number, Batch number, CCF number and the Non-negative test for which the sample was
targeted. The listings on the calendar (placed on boxes containing the sample documentation), in
conjunction with the selected NNSL, organize the specimen documentation for easy retrieval and review
by the inspectors. Inspectors to our laboratory have praised this organizational scheme. As pre-inspection
guidelines become increasingly time consuming, this approach may be useful for other SAMSHA-certified
laboratories.
Keywords: NNSL, SAMHSA, Non-negative
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