Evaluation of the Accuracy of Two Point-of-care Haemoglobin meters used in Cameroon.

CaHReF 2016, Yaoundé Conges hall, 23 – 26 August 2016 , PL148

Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Buea

Anaemia remains a global public health challenge. Less developed countries bear the highest burden in terms of morbidity and mortality. This is because conventional laboratories are expensive to set up in these low resource settings-consequently most cases of anaemia go undetected and thus untreated. The use of point-of-care haemoglobin meters is potentially economically advantageous and time-saving in these settings and may also be of tremendous help in critical care units where rapid and frequent testing are required. Despite these potential benefits,there is a lot of concern regarding the accuracy of these meters-a hindrance to their adoption.

To determine the technical and clinical accuracy of two point-of-care haemoglobin meters used in Cameroon and to determine their agreement with a standard analyser in diagnosing anaemia.
We carried out a cross-sectional study in Douala General Hospital. The two meters (Urit12 (URIT Medical Electronics, Co.,Ltd, Guangxi, China) and MissionHb (ACON Laboratories, Inc, San Diego, USA) were evaluated by comparing their performance against the conventional analyser (CELL-DYN RUBY (ABBOTT Diagnostics, Illinois, USA). The capillary haemoglobin values of 228 participants were measured with both meters immediately after venous samples were collected for full blood count analysis.

The Pearson's correlation coefficient with the reference was 0.89 for Urit12 and 0.90 for MissionHb and there was no significant difference between the two. The Bland-Altman plot for Urit12 had 95.6% of the difference plots in the 95% limits of agreement (-2.1, 2.7) and the mean bias was 0.3 g/dl. That of MissionHb had 96.9% of the difference plots within the limits of agreement (-1.1, 3.2) with mean bias of 1g/dl. However the total allowable error for both meters were greater than the +/-7% recommended for haemoglobin measurement (52.2% for Urit12 and 52.5% for MissionHb)
Both meters showed good technical performance but had unacceptable limits of error to be useful clinically.

Anaemia, Accuracy, Point-of-care Haemoglobin meters.