Not All Patients Understand Lab Results
The biggest fear I have with a patient portal is explaining all the abnormal lab results that really aren’t that abnormal. For the doctors reading this you know what I mean. How may slightly high bilirubins or RDWs have you had to gloss over? Well, a new study from the University of Michigan showed that only slightly more than half of patients were able to decipher electronic lab test results on their own. Unless your practice is small and you have the time to do so then get ready to be overwhelmed (even more). Why? Because as Ricky Ricardo used to say, “Lucy, you got some splainin to do!”
Welcome to the World of the Normal – where everything must be within two-sigma of the mean, or it is an outlier, and outliers are “abnormal.”
My wife had a SGOT which was faintly below the two-tail 95% standard. Therefore, it was flagged as abnormal. I do not charge my wife for advice, but she was skeptical of my indifference towards the result.
Mediocrity are the Clothing of the Empire – the King wears them. Patients are of no interest, except for their deviance from the norm.
“The biggest fear I have with a patient portal is explaining all the abnormal lab results that really aren’t that abnormal”
Doug – welcome to the 21st century. What you fear – what your REAL “biggest fear” is – is explaining to your patients what your value to them is, which is not “doing something about” those lab results, but providing your patients a highly-trained health professional’s view of a context for them to “do something about” them, if that’s their inclination. Because that’s not something you were trained to do, or have had any inclination to do heretofore.