Ordering Labs and Reading Results

Lab orders are placed in LabCorp Link; results come back into OfficePro and land on the patient's chart. This covers both ends, and the join between them.

Placing an order

Orders are placed in LabCorp Link, not in OfficePro. You build the order in the lab's own software, using its test menu, its priorities and its requisition.

What OfficePro provides is the demographic bridge, so nothing is retyped. In LabCorp Link's patient search, look the patient up by their MRN or patient ID from OfficePro. That pulls their demographics and your insurance company list straight across.

Two things follow from that, and both matter:

• Fix the patient record in OfficePro first. The bridge sends what OfficePro holds. A wrong date of birth or a misspelt surname travels to the lab and comes back on the result, where it is what the report is matched on - so it becomes an unassigned result later.
• Use the MRN, not the name. Searching by name in LabCorp Link finds whoever it finds. The patient ID is the thing that ties the order you place to the record the result lands on.

The bridge is read-only and authenticates by the IP address you connect from, so it works from the clinic and not from elsewhere. If the patient lookup returns nothing, see the troubleshooting article before re-keying the patient by hand.

Finding results

Two places, for two different jobs:

• On the patient, under Lab Reports, with Open Report and Print Report. This is the clinical view.
• Practice-wide, in Lab Pro Reports, showing the Accession, when it was Ordered, when Labs Received came back, any Alert, and Control. Use Show to set the period and Clear to reset it.

The accession number is the lab's own reference. It is what to quote when you ring them.

Reading a report

Each result line shows the test, the result, its units, the reference range, a flag, where it was performed and its status.

Where a patient has had the same test before, the test name is a link to its history - the fastest way to see whether a value is drifting or has always been where it is.

What the flags mean, exactly

Any flagged result is shown in bold. Only some are marked Critical Result, with a highlight and a warning icon:

• Marked critical: HH and LL for critically high and low, CH and CL, and > or < where the value is off the measurable scale.
• Bold only: everything else, including a plain H or L, and the A that some labs send for "abnormal".

This distinction matters clinically. Plain H and L are the overwhelming majority of flagged results - across all practices they outnumber critical flags by more than two hundred to one. A result being un-highlighted means the lab did not call it critical, not that it is normal. Read the flag column, not the colour.

A report the lab has marked as carrying a critical value shows an ALERT badge in the reports list. Those are worth working first.

Results that arrive without an order

Results come back for labs you did not order through OfficePro too - a hospital, a specialist, a lab the patient went to directly. They appear the same way, and they still need attaching to the right patient if the lab's details did not match yours.