Lab Orders & Results
Order from wherever you are working
Tests are ordered from the patient’s dashboard, from the appointment, or during the visit as you document. Providers order and sign; medical assistants and nurses can prepare orders for review, and front-desk staff can start one at check-in or check-out. Everyone works from the same order rather than from a paper requisition that has to be found again later.
Orders can be sent electronically to the lab, or handled manually when that is how a particular lab works. Either way the order exists in the system with a status you can see: pending, sent to the lab, resulted, or declined.
Results land in the chart, not in a fax pile
Results return into the patient’s record against the order that produced them. Each result carries the detail that makes it usable rather than just readable:
- Test name with its LOINC code, so results are identified consistently across labs.
- Value and unit, with the reference range supplied by the performing lab — because the same test from two labs can have different ranges, and using the wrong one is how a normal result gets treated as abnormal.
- A flag — normal, high, low, abnormal or critical.
- Collected date and resulted date, which are not the same thing and sometimes matter.
- The performing lab.
- Review status — pending, reviewed, acknowledged, or action required.
Nothing sits unreviewed
Every provider has a to-do view answering one question: what needs my attention now? Incoming results queue there until they are reviewed and acknowledged, and abnormal or critical flags are visible rather than buried in a list of normals.
For practices with dedicated results staff there is a separate review queue, so someone can work through incoming results systematically and escalate what needs a clinician. The review status travels with the result, so at any point you can tell what has been seen, by whom, and what is still outstanding.
Outstanding orders are tracked too. A test that was ordered and never resulted is one of the easiest things for a practice to lose, and it is visible here rather than discovered months later.
Values are useful. Trends are more useful.
Results are viewable in the patient’s chart historically, with graphing so you can see the direction of travel rather than a single number in isolation. An A1c of 7.4 means one thing after 8.9 and something quite different after 6.5.
Standing and recurring orders
Tests a patient needs repeatedly — a quarterly panel, an annual screen — can be set up as standing or recurring orders rather than remembered and re-entered each time. The order generates when it is due, and it appears in the same workflow as everything else.
When results arrive on paper
Not every lab a practice uses transmits electronically. Results that arrive by fax can be filed against the correct order and patient, so the chart stays complete and the outstanding-orders list stays accurate — rather than the electronic ones being tracked properly and the rest living in a tray.