FIVE (5) Strategies for Complex Patients who Present with Hundreds of Pages of both Accurate and Worthless Laboratory Results

Set limits and set expectations early; don't give away your time and expertise for free

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Update Sep2025 by Dr Alex Vasquez: Practical Clinical Approach to Complex Patients who Present with Hundreds of Pages of both Accurate and Worthless Laboratory Results

Now that patients have open access to obtaining their own laboratory tests, practicing clinicians are increasingly faced with the daunting task of receiving hundreds of pages of irrelevant, misleading, and outdated laboratory results that patients provide with the expectation that the clinician will invest/waste unlimited hours reading, deciphering and integrating into an up-to-date treatment plan, even when some of those results might be more than ten years old and are thus (generally) completely irrelevant. Armed with uneducated and inexperienced babble from random unselected and uncredentialed social media gurus, patients arrive with the unreasonable expectation that all abnormal results have importance and deserve investigation at the time/attention expense and responsibility of the clinician who has now received this generally random and unorganized massive “data dump.” This is unreasonable, impractical, and disrespectful; clinicians are well-served by anticipation and preparation with policies/statements to prevent these problems and their consequences, the most severe of which is that the clinician results with medicolegal liability from “failure to diagnose” or “failure to treat” because some unsuspected laboratory result was hidden like a proverbial needle in a haystack buried in a chaotic data dump of hundreds of laboratory results that the clinician himself/herself never even ordered.

FIVE (5) Tactics for Avoiding the Dangerous (and Unpaid) Data Dump

Tactic 1: Set date limits so you’re not reviewing outdated/irrelevant/misleading laboratory results:

For most situations, lab tests should be current within the past 3 (three) months to a maximum of six (6) months; biopsy, imaging tests, and a few specialty tests might maintain their validity for more time but also have their limits.

Tactic 2: Require that lab results such as digital/PDF copies are labeled with 1) name, 2) timeframe, 3) description:

Perhaps without doing so consciously, patients are causing confusion, wasting clinicians’ time and focus, and distracting away from their own care by sending a disorganized batch of unnamed, undescribed, and outdated laboratory results. Oftentimes, patients send partial photos and screenshots of laboratory results that don’t meet any medicolegal standard of utility as the incomplete images are devoid of name and date; as such, the doctor can result being asked to review laboratory results that are not even those of the patient being evaluated and treated. Reasonable instructions include the following example:

About the Author and Presenter: Dr Alex Vasquez

CONFERENCE VIDEO Integrating Functional and Naturopathic Medicine (F.I.N.D.S.E.X.® Protocol) into Medical Practice for Common Primary Care and Specialty Conditions [2020, Moscow]

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