Electronic Lab Results Critical to Patient Care

13 May 2016

Patients typically find they are limited to use the lab company contracted by their insurance company. The two largest lab companies in the U.S. are LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics. Out of the 5,686 hospitals in the U.S., most hospitals offer in-house labs that compete with companies such as LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics. Having a multitude of lab companies competing for lab business in the U.S. works to lower lab fees for consumers and insurance companies. At the same time, Electronic Health Record vendors are forced to develop lab interfaces with each lab company in order to capture electronic lab results for the doctor. What good is having one lab company online electronically if the other lab company the patient must use for other labs is not online with that EHR vendor?

With the growing number of patients using technology to access their health records online, many patients wonder why they are not able to view all their lab results in their health records. In order to display lab results electronically in the patient’s health records, the lab company must have an interface with the physicians (EHR) electronic health record software. With thousands of lab companies located throughout the U.S. is it virtually impossible for any one EHR company to have active interfaces with all lab company in the U.S. If you do not see your lab results electronically when logging in to check your health records then you need to request that your physician contacts your lab company to complete an electronic lab interface.

When the federal government mandated that physician must provide online health records access to their patients, they fell short on implementing a solution that would easily connect all lab companies with all EHR companies. As a result, patients that use large national lab companies such as LabCorp or Quest Diagnostics have access to their lab results electronically compared to patients that use local, regional or hospital lab companies.

As the leading healthcare technology provider for online access to health records, ViewMyHealthRecords.com has engineered our software to make it simple for patients to review their lab results online. Each time a patient has lab work completed by their healthcare provider an email alert is sent from ViewMyHealthRecords.com to alert the patient regarding the new lab results. The patient can follow the link in the email to login and review their electronic lab results. Thousands of healthcare professionals trust ViewMyHealthRecords.com to provide their patient 24/7 access to their health record. If your healthcare provider is not currently providing online access to your health records then chances are they are not complying with these new federal guidelines. Granting online access to your health records is no longer an option but the law.

To learn how you can access your health records online have your healthcare provider contact ViewMyHealthRecords.com.