The Meaning of Patient-Centric in Relationship to the LIS

When participating in a recent discussion group that was attempting to define the LIS of the future, the term patient-centric was raised.  I began to wonder whether the notion of patient-centricity has any relevance for the design of an LIS. Understanding that the term has become somewhat of a cliche recently, I decided to develop this note in order to begin to explore the relevance of of the concept for the LIS.

First of all, I suspect that most lab professionals will probably view physicians as the primary "customers" of the clinical labs. If they consider patients as customers at all, it's probably in a tangential manner with the physicians as the critical intermediaries. For the record and in order to pursue this discussion of the patient-centric LIS, I think that both physicians and patients should be viewed as customers of the clinical labs and therefore of the LIS.

Having gotten this point out of the way, I think that there are three important criteria for a patient-centric LIS:

• Patients should have ready access to their test results that are archived in the LIS, understanding that some test results such as reports of malignant disease need to be first presented to a patient by their personal physician in order to place them in the proper medical context.
• Lab test results need to be portable, which is to say that they can be electronically replicated to systems or media controlled by the patient such as personal health records. Such portability is critical if and when patients seek a second opinion about a diagnosis or wants to change healthcare providers.
• Lastly, the patient should be able to acquire some knowledge about the significance of various test results. Such knowledge can be provided by the laboratory generating the results or the patient can be guided to reliable sources of lab information on the web.

Regarding the portability of lab results, I personally believe that all labs should have the capability of generating PDF files of test results for patient use. I have made this point in previous notes (see: What Patients Really Want: An Introduction to the e-Patient). Below is an excerpt from this latter note:

Every lab report transmitted to physicians should be available in PDF format. With the approval and support of clinicians and their staff members, these PDF reports should then be made available to patients, often as attachments to office emails, as soon as they are distributed. Abnormal results for individual patients can be explained by supplementary notes and links can also be provided to high-quality web sites that discuss lab tests and provide reference ranges.

The three criteria listed above that help to define a patient-centric LIS seem eminently reasonable to me and will also serve to make pathology and the clinical laboratories more visible and accessible to patients and healthcare consumers.

Comments

[The PACS Designer]

Under a patient-physician partnership, a PDF of the patient's data parameters from the LIS and other systems would certainly aid in educating the patient about their condition quickly, and assist in determining a possible treatment plan. As a member of ASTM International's E31 Heathcare Informatics Committee, I can tell you that we are developing a healthcare PDF to help bring the patient and physician timely information.