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/Mohrisbetr 13d ago

Holy shit how would anyone stay subscribed to that

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u/mayaorsomething 12d ago edited 12d ago

Took one peek at the subreddit and already found this gem of someone “needing help interpreting their CBC” because their appointment isn’t until next week.

The real sparkle comes from this exchange in the comments:

OP:

I will need to wait for the results of additional bloodwork and inform my GP in a week. I truly hope it's nothing serious such as the "C" word. I have been worrying constantly and felt quite unwell ovee the past 2 months.

MD:

The c word here is "cold". This looks like you have a cold.

ETA: And I mean no offense to that person; I feel like the big red numbers with upward arrows just simply should not be a thing for a patient’s MyChart view.

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u/MrPBH ED Attending 11d ago

I have been saying that since the law came out: give the patients access to their lab results but take out all the red bolding, up and down arrows. Make a hyperlink at the bottom to reference values (so they have to navigate between two screens to compare numbers, but still have access to all relevant data).

The law says we have to give them access to the records. It doesn't say it has to contain any interpretation of the data.

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u/mayaorsomething 11d ago edited 11d ago

Yeah it just seems like a laziness to correct the system, to be honest. It's so often a misleading interpretation of the data (in terms of what patients gather from it); not just a neutral addition... so it would seem like an obvious thing to fix. Maybe not enough people have complained about it.