Lab tests are one of the highest volume activities in healthcare that inform between 70 - 80% of all clinical decisions. Keeping pace with the high volume of lab results that are so vital to patient care can at times be overwhelming. Complicating matters more are the lab results that don’t come “over the wire” v
ia an electronic lab interface– what are often referred to as non-interfaced or external lab results. The challenge gets even more complicated when you receive partial or duplicate lab results from non-interfaced sources.
Resolving these incomplete or duplicate lab results that typically arrive by fax is a time-consuming task for staff. Matching up and reconciling duplicates not only cuts into time spent doing other important tasks, it also increases costs. Even more importantly, it increases the risk to patients as a result of human errors trying to keep all of these records straight – such as managing the influx of complex, multi-component lab tests often reported as each component test is completed and then again when the full test panel is done.
If you stop to think about this common case, managing these duplicates not only requires knowledge of the patient and the physician’s test orders, it also requires knowledge of the test and the components that constitute a complete test.
Fortunately, there’s a better way to manage these important records with intelligent clinical data capture software that can automatically identify and merge duplicate tests. Too see how it works watch this two-minute video.
