Pathology Integration
- Mohammad Al-Ubaydli
Giving patients their test results is one of the most helpful things you can do for your patients. Through access to their test results patients can:
Better understand and manage their own health without using up scarce health care resources.
When they do need help from professionals they can explain their own health saving the professionals time.
Allow professionals and carers to view their test results.
The Patients Know Best platform includes a section to show a patient their test results. Test results can come via an HL7 integration from any source, including when multiple laboratories have processed samples from all the providers looking after the patient. As well as from patient and carers who might manually upload test results from print-outs.
Full instructions are available on the developer wiki about how to send data via HL7 into PKB, which includes the specifications for the HL7 ORU messages used to send pathology and radiology data. Corrections and deletions can be issued by the lab IT systems using the HL7 interface. Only the lab that authored a test result can correct or delete it. A data point marked for deletion is hidden from users but stored for medico-legal audit purposes.
The individual tests normally appear in the same groupings as they were sent from the laboratory, supported by appropriate graphical representation and additional data such as the source of each data point (e.g. patient-entered data vs lab-transferred data), exact timestamps, notes and ranges. Data points on the table can be discussed with members of the clinical team via messaging and a warning at the top of the page reminds the patient that the clinical team is the first point of contact, rather than the laboratory team.
When test results arrive, the patient and carer are notified on the email addresses that they registered with. The email does not divulge what the test result is or which team it came from, only that new data is available to see. The patient and their carers can see these test results after logging into the patient's record, unless the team had set up a delay for the display of some test results. Professionals are not notified but they can see the latest results, with no delays, when looking at a patient's record.