Records For Living Community

Tests. What would be really, really special(no other PHR that I know of does this) is to record blood, urine and other similar tests like the laboratory reports only a little more informative. In addition to the Item Name, Value, and Units currently available in HealthFrame, also provide entries for the Reference Range(other names – Reference Interval, Reference Values) and an auto calculated %Low-High. The %Low-High is a program generated value based on the percent below the Low Reference Range value(i.e. 5%L), or the percent above the High Reference Range value(i.e. 8%H). Test results that fall within the Reference Range might show a check mark or OK or Ave(for Average). I can not tell you the number of times different doctors have over looked significant HIGH or LOW flags because the percent over or under isn’t shown on the report.

 

The above will need a little modification for urine, pleural fluid, etc. tests.  Instead of noting High or Low, many lab reports use ‘Abnormal’ or the value may just be flagged with an asterisk without comment. Also, the Result and the Reference Range could be a word instead of a number or number range. Possibly the degree of difficulty to accomplish this suggestion is why it hasn’t been done yet.

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robert

This is a brilliant, and exciting suggestion.

It turns out - we worked on doing almost precisely this for HealthFrame v2, but we ran into some complexities, and decided it was more prudent to think through exactly how to add these additional fields, than to commit ourselves to an approach and then have to change.

Among the technical challenges this suggestion presents are:
    (1)   For some measurements, this is inappropriate (for example, if you weight yourself each day, or once a week)
    (2)   For some measurements, the appropriate 'range' is not uniformly agreed upon (I believe cholesterol might fall into this category, but as I'm not an expert, I could be wrong with this example)
    (3)   For some measurements, the appropriate range is dependent on the lab which did the measurements, wherease for others, the appropriate range is purely (or at least primarily) dependent on the measurement itself (or perhaps age/gender of the person being measured)

    One approach would be to just ALWAYS allow this information to be specified, and allow it to be left blank. But that approach has costs. In cases where the fields are NOT appropriate, it wastes visual space and maybe confusing.

    Also - by providing fields that can be filled in (say for the range of high/low values) - you eliminate the possability that the computer might be able to pre-provide those range values based on knoweldge about what are generally accepted ranges.

    Still - we are very grateful for your raising this issue, and we are definitely thinking very hard about how we might provide this functionality - in a non-intrusive, but useful way for healthcare consumers.

    If you wish to share any more of your ideas for how we can make this functionality available, while mimizing the downsides of extra complexity, we'd love to hear them.

    And you may wish to contact Records for Living technical support about joining our beta program (towards the end of this year), when we will be experimenting with some approaches to solving this problem.

                   The Support Team.