Use Case Repository
Request and results sharing workflow for laboratory on a National/regional scale
Purpose:
The secure sharing of laboratory reports (such as their publishing, finding and retrieval) and test results across a group of hospitals and practices within a region or nation. This use case provides ambulatory providers with secure yet easy online access to new laboratory test results for their patients, as well as earlier test results for comparison.
Relevance:
Today, about 60-70% of all diagnoses are based on clinical laboratory testing. The spectrum of testing ranges from highly standardised cost efficient commodity testing, such as blood counts or clinical chemistry, to innovative, personalised testing procedures for analysis of human genetics.
All healthcare professionals involved in the healthcare episode of a patient should have access to the relevant laboratory results for their role in the healthcare process. Laboratory results information often comes from different sources. For the end-users, a transparent, source-independent, combined viewing of these results provides them with the necessary background for their decision-making. The patient should also have access to these laboratory results.
Domain:
Laboratory
Scale(s):
National/Regional
Context:
- Current “state-of-the-art” order processes for “external” users such as GPs still involves a lot of paper work. This leads to manual work, errors in patient and order demographics and is considered to be very time consuming. Moreover, this procedure is notoriously error prone.
- There is a huge interest among laboratories and primary care professionals in electronic ordering systems. However, there is a risk that this may lead to non-standardised solutions that may solve the electronic ordering process from the perspective of a single laboratory, but do not reduce the workload for a general practitioner working with different laboratories.
- There is a demand for on-line access to lab test results, both from healthcare professionals and as part of an on-line electronic patient record. Today’s solutions mainly involve dedicated pointto-point communication between laboratory and GP’s information systems. The GP typically only has access to lab results of tests ordered by him / herself. It is nearly impossible to find out what other lab results are available for a patient.
Information:
Laboratory request information
Laboratory results
Participants:
Specialist
Laboratory assistant
Laboratory analyst
Functional process flow:
- A patient visits his general practitioner with complaints of fatigue
- The doctor orders a blood screening by filling in a paper order 32 form. He asks the patient to go to a phlebotomy (blood drawing) facility of choice, to get blood drawn.
- The patient shows up at the phlebotomy station and shows the paper form. Blood is drawn and the samples are marked
- The phlebotomy station sends the test tubes to the laboratory
- The laboratory performs the tests
- The laboratory sends the test results to the requester of the tests
Source:
