r/emergencymedicine • u/Princessgargoyle ED Attending • 13d ago
Advice Patients interpreting their own portal results
Attending physician new to practicing in a more affluent area. How are you all dealing with patients asking for explanations for each out-of-range lab result that popped up in their patient portal?
I’m finding this aspect of my new site to be very frustrating and time consuming to have to convince the patient why the google interpretation of their isolated eosinophilia or glucose of 100 does not align with my “Great news! Everything looks good!”
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u/GreatMalbenego 13d ago
Honestly I’ve started bringing my phone in and just going through their workup with them and giving a very brief explanation, sometimes just saying “XYZ might mean blah blah but in your context it’s not relevant to evaluation of emergencies, which is what we’re doing here, but I’d recommend reviewing with your PCP”. “That’s not a specific lab and in your context doesn’t give me info about your complaint.” It puts it all to bed, answers most questions (or they forget all the whatabouts they were gonna say), and it leaves the patient satisfied.
Bonus: it protects medicolegally, makes sure I don’t forget to notify of an incidental imaging finding, ends up saving me time because I don’t get called back in after I’ve already had the discharge talk, and a lot of the time I inform the patient of something beneficial that for god knows why no one had told them. How tf people have never been told “you probably have chronic kidney disease” with elevated creat x5 years is beyond me.
Some of them like mildly elevated eosinophils have prompted me to come up with a reassuring one-liner that makes it an expedient process.