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To the Editor.-Question GEN 20375 of the College of American Pathologists (CAP) Laboratory Accreditation Checklist requires that all laboratories have a document control policy in place "to manage policies, procedures, and forms that are subject to CAP accreditation."1 The document control system must "ensure that only current policies, procedures (including derivative documents, such as card files and summary charts), and forms are in use and that records for approval, review, and discontinuance are available. Discontinued documents must be appropriately archived and removed from general access. It is recommended that the laboratory maintain a control log listing all current policies, procedures, and forms."1 Although there are commercial document control products to manage a laboratory's policies and procedures, these can be expensive. As a result, many laboratories use a locally developed system of Microsoft Word or similar documents for their policies and perform document control using a combination of spreadsheets and manual updating and version control. Very often this is managed by the laboratory itself, without any significant technical or administrative support from the institution. Because these products have only limited access and version controls, the medical director may not always know if a document has been altered.
Git is an open-source product for version control that is widely used in the computer software industry. Github (github.com; accessed March 20, 2020) is an online site where many software engineers store and maintain their content using Git. Although Git was originally designed as a free command line tool, recently several versions of Git (sublimeMerge [sub limeMerge.com; accessed March 20, 2020]...