Deadlines you cannot forget
Every distribution's submission deadline, staged reminders at 7, 3 and 1 days, an overdue state, an Action Centre signal and a downloadable calendar with alarms.
Add-on module
EQA returns on time, failures investigated properly, the year summarised for you.
External quality assessment is easy to run and hard to evidence: deadlines live in someone's inbox, investigations in an email thread, the annual review in a rush. Catenix keeps the scheme calendar, the returns, the investigations and the trend in one place, next to the QC they belong with.
- Reminders at 7, 3 and 1 days and overdue
- Calendar file with alarms
- Investigations with root cause and verification
- Annual summary printed
What it does
From distribution to signed investigation.
Sample receipt
Log when the sample arrived, who received it and its condition: fine, damaged, late, missing or out of temperature.
Investigations that finish
A board of open investigations by stage: open, investigating, actions agreed, verification, review, closed. Each holds a classification, root-cause method, actions with owners, a verification value with its z-score, and a signed review statement.
Close gates
An investigation refuses to close while the classification, root cause, open actions or a failed verification are outstanding, and the audit row records who signed it and when.
Z-score trends
Per-analyte trends over 24 months with the plus and minus 2 and 3 lines, and a flag when the pattern shifts.
Annual summary
Participation, performance by analyte and device, investigations and a performance statement, as printable HTML or PDF for the management review.
Non-conformance link
Raise an NC from the investigation in one step, or let a failed return open a major NC automatically through Quality Management.
Returns needing attention
A list of failed and warning returns from the last 12 months that have no investigation yet.
A failed return, end to end
What good looks like, without the email thread.
The return comes back as a fail
It appears in the list of returns needing an investigation, and can open a major non-conformance automatically.
Investigate
Classify it, work through five-whys or a fishbone, record the root cause and impact, and note any patients affected.
Act and verify
Assign corrective and preventive actions with owners and dates. Run the verification sample; the z-score is computed and a pass is recorded at within 2.
Close with a signature
The review statement is signed, the audit row carries the name and time, and the whole investigation is in the annual summary.
A clear boundary
Catenix is connectivity, workflow, record-keeping and data display. It does not interpret results, calculate clinical values, classify or flag results clinically, or provide clinical decision support. Statistics describe methods, processes and datasets, never a patient. Any reference range or note shown is customer-authored content Catenix displays.
Questions, answered
The questions teams ask first.
How are EQA deadlines tracked?
Every distribution has a submission deadline. Reminders are staged at 7, 3 and 1 days and overdue, appear in the Action Centre and can be delivered as notifications. A calendar file (.ics) with one all-day event per distribution and built-in alarms can be downloaded into Outlook or Google Calendar.
What happens after a failed or warning return?
An investigation is opened against the return, with a reference such as EQA-INV-2026-014, a classification (clerical, sample handling, analytical, method, unknown), a five-whys or fishbone root-cause analysis, corrective and preventive actions with owners and due dates, a verification run with its z-score, and a signed review statement. It cannot be closed while the classification, root cause, open actions or a failed verification are outstanding.
Can an investigation raise a non-conformance?
Yes, in one step, with the investigation as the source. EQA failures can also open a major non-conformance automatically through Quality Management.
What goes in the annual summary?
Participation, returns, performance by analyte and by device, investigations and a performance statement, as JSON, printable HTML or PDF.
Is EQA part of the core platform?
External Quality is a marketplace add-on. Everything on this page is included in it.
Bring your scheme calendar.
We will load a distribution, show the reminders and calendar file, and walk an investigation from failed return to signed closure.