Patients interpreting their own portal results

[u/Princessgargoyle]

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!”

[u/D15c0untMD]

„I know it seems off or scary if you see some elevated results. What i‘m looking for is certain patterns of elevated or depressed values, as isolated changes can be due to a multitude of reasons unrelated to your health status. For example, this one here is elevated, but only relevant if this one was also, etc. From my experience and training, this is an unremarkable report, in the best way.“

[u/DetTech88 → u/D15c0untMD]

I have a very similar explanation. I say that “normal range” means that most healthy people will fall in this range, but 1 in 20 healthy people will likely fall outside of it. You need to combine this results with other lab results to see if it’s significant, and since your values for x, y, and z are normal, and your results don’t follow any disease pattern, I’m confident in saying it’s nothing to worry about.