OMA opens state QA lab and creates patient services unit to bolster testing and outreach

The Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority told its Executive Advisory Council that construction of the agency’s quality assurance (QA) laboratory is complete, major analytical instruments have begun arriving and the agency has started the accreditation process aimed at ISO/IEC 17025 standards.

Lee Rhodes, chief science officer at OMA, described the lab and its objectives as an additional line of defense for public safety, not a replacement for private commercial laboratories. “We're going to do what I've called parallel testing,” Rhodes said, describing plans to collect reserve samples and run identical tests to compare OMA results to commercial lab outputs.

Why it matters: OMA said the QA lab will help identify product recalls, reduce inter-lab variability, support law enforcement testing of hemp-derived products, and promote best practices across commercial labs — all of which the agency said should improve patient safety.

Lab status and capabilities OMA reported delivery of a high-performance liquid chromatograph (HPLC) already on-site for cannabinoid concentration testing and imminent delivery of an LC–MS/MS for pesticides and mycotoxins, multiple gas chromatographs (one with mass spectrometry) for additional pesticide testing, an ICP–MS for heavy metals testing, and a qPCR unit for microbiology analysis. Staff said peripheral equipment is on hand and four analysts plus a quality-assurance manager are now employed in the laboratory.

Accreditation, testing approach and enforcement OMA said it has begun the ISO 17025 accreditation process and is working with a chosen provider to expedite accreditation. Rhodes described two primary QA activities: parallel testing using reserve samples drawn from commercial labs’ retained reserves, and a round‑robin program in which OMA will distribute a master sample to commercial labs and evaluate inter-lab variability.

On discrepancies, Rhodes said the agency will conduct root-cause analyses: “All we'll know at that point is that we have a discrepancy. We will start investigating why that may be. We will look at what the laboratory did. We'll certainly review our own processes … and then continue with a root cause analysis until we actually come up with an answer.”

Patient services unit OMA also announced a new patient services department to focus on licensing navigation, customer service, education and public-health‑oriented outreach for clinicians and patients. Lee Rhodes said the agency has hired a patient services director with 20 years of direct patient-care experience and a master's degree in medical marijuana therapeutics; she will begin in the role the week after the meeting.

Questions from industry members Growers and processors at the meeting raised concerns about how prepackaging and secret-shop testing will interact with potential microbial growth after packaging, the practical implications of retesting and recalls, and whether OMA will publish lab accuracy rankings. OMA staff said the QA lab’s data may enable new analytics — for example, identifying labs that are statistical outliers — but staff did not announce an immediate public ranking system.

Ending: OMA said the QA lab will also assist other agencies, including law enforcement and the attorney general, in testing hemp-derived products that are circulating outside conventional retail channels; staff said that agency support is underway but that statutory authority limits some of OMA’s present enforcement options.