Multicentre evaluation of the Boehringer Mannheim Elecsys 2010 immunoassay system, hardware and software reliability/practicability of the system.

The reliability of Elecsys 2010 and its practicability in the daily laboratory routine has been assessed in a multicentre evaluation. The twelve evaluators confirmed that the instrument hardware as well as the software worked reliable during the whole evaluation period of about six months. The cause of few hardware problems could be identified and resulted in respective improvements. Software malfunctions reported were fixed with subsequent software releases, suggestions for feature improvements made by the evaluators will be integrated in forthcoming versions. For the assessment of system practicability a questionnaire with 160 questions covering all important aspects of an analytical system was used. Six of twelve groups of attributes were rated higher for Elecsys 2010, the other six groups were rated equal in comparison to the respective in-house instrument. High gradings were especially given for the sections training/operation, sample processing, reagent handling and calibration.