Solving quality assurance problems with object scripting languages

摘要

It is now possible for surgical pathology and cytology reports to be collected in a programming environment that permits a laboratory to answer all anatomic pathology quality assurance (QA) questions arising within the hospital. These questions may pertain to an individual clinician's ability to provide adequate specimens, to a pathologist's report turn-around time, to a cytology department's overall diagnostic accuracy, or to any aspect of pathology records. Most importantly, these questions can now be posed and answered as they arise, freeing departments of constraints imposed by commercially available anatomic pathology software packages. The necessary quality assurance expert system can be achieved through the use of object scripting languages that allow a programmer to treat reports and data fields as programmable units. In this report, the general properties of scripting environments are reviewed. Guidelines for using Hypercard as a prototypical programming environment for surgical pathology and cytology reports are provided along with sample quality assurance scripts.