What patients see when results are published

Patients only ever see lab results a clinician has approved. Until then, nothing from the upload appears in their portal: not the file, not the values, not the fact that a report has arrived.

When results become visible

Results appear in the patient portal when one of these happens:

• A clinician selects Approve & publish results to patient and your clinic has no lab results delay.
• The delay your clinic has set runs out after approval or manual entry.
• A clinician selects Publish now on results that are scheduled.
• A clinician saves manually entered results with Save & publish to patient (after the delay, if your clinic has one).

Rejected uploads, uploads still waiting for review and uploads that have been archived are never shown.

Where patients find them

Patients sign in to your portal and select Results. The page is headed Your results and lists each published panel, newest first, with the laboratory name, sample date and number of results. The portal home page also shows Recent lab results.

Before anything is published, the page says Your results will appear here once your practitioner publishes them.

What a panel shows

When a patient opens a panel, they see:

• Your note, if you added one, headed From your practitioner at the top.
• Each result: the analyte name, the value in large type, the unit, and Reference range: as printed on the lab report.
• High and low markers: High, Low, Very high or Very low, each with an arrow, taken from the lab’s own flags. A result without a flag shows no marker.
• A trend chart, when the patient has two or more published results for the same analyte. It plots earlier results against the reference range so the patient can see how a value has moved.

Patients don’t see the original PDF, the AI’s confidence scores or anything about how the results were read.

Telling the patient

When results become visible, the patient is sent a message by email or text (depending on their settings) to say their results are ready. This happens on every route to the portal: approval with no delay, manual entry, Publish now, or the end of a delay. When a delay ends, the message goes within about 30 minutes. The patient is told once per upload, however the results were published.

The message never includes the results themselves. It asks the patient to sign in, says a clinician has reviewed them, and suggests they contact you if anything worries them.

Owners can turn the message off for the whole clinic with Lab results published in Clinic settings > Patient notifications. See Choose which messages patients receive.

Good to know

• Your note is the place to explain what a result means for this patient. The portal shows values and ranges but doesn’t interpret them.
• Each time a patient opens their results, it’s recorded in the audit log.
• Patients can ask about their results from the Questions page in the portal. A question about their own results always goes to a clinician for a reply. See How patient questions work.