More than two-thirds of US adults who received immediately released medical test results viewed them before speaking with a healthcare professional, according to a new study published in JAMA Network Open.
The study was led by researchers at the New York University School of Global Public Health, with collaborators from Rutgers University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Utah.
The findings indicate that patients increasingly encounter clinical laboratory results without a physician or other provider available to explain what the numbers mean. This could place greater pressure on clinical laboratories and health systems to present results in language patients can understand while preserving the technical information clinicians need.
Such decisions can’t exist in a vacuum, as patient portals require health IT vendors and internal IT teams to configure software to present information in a certain way to users. Few, if any, labs have the ability to simply go into a portal’s coding and adjust how test results are shown to patients.
Researchers analyzed responses from 4,982 participants in the 2024 Health Information National Trends Survey. After weighting the findings to represent nearly 175 million US adults, they determined that 68.6% viewed immediately released results before hearing from a healthcare practitioner.
Among those patients, 34.9% said they understood the results “very well” and 31.7% said they understood them “well.” However, 26.8% understood their results only “fairly well,” while 6.6% reported poor understanding.
Higher digital literacy and stronger patient-centered communication significantly reduced the likelihood of a patient misunderstanding their data, according to the study. Conversely, even after adjusting for socioeconomic backgrounds and digital fluency, living in the Midwest or South—along with experiencing medical care discrimination—remained independent predictors of poor test result comprehension.
“The Cures Act has restructured the traditional pathway between the release of a test result to a patient-clinician discussion,” said Jemar Bather, PhD, assistant professor of biostatistics at the New York University School of Global Public Health and the study’s lead author, in an NYU announcement.
Implications for clinical laboratories
Federal information-blocking rules associated with the 21st Century Cures Act generally require healthcare providers to make electronic health information—including laboratory and pathology results—available to patients without unnecessary delay. Consequently, patients may receive complex or concerning findings through electronic portals before their doctors have reviewed them.
For clinical laboratory leaders, the study raises questions about whether conventional laboratory reports are suited to this new audience. Patient-facing reports could potentially include clearer descriptions of reference ranges, standardized explanations of abnormal flags, definitions of technical terminology, and instructions describing when patients should contact their providers.
Laboratories will need to balance those additions against the risk of oversimplifying findings or offering interpretations that lack the patient’s complete clinical context.
The researchers noted that the study relied on self-reported understanding and did not objectively measure whether patients interpreted their results correctly. Nevertheless, the findings suggest that immediate access alone may not ensure that patients understand the information clinical laboratories provide.
This article was created with the assistance of Generative AI and has undergone editorial review before publishing.
