One post tagged with "automation"

Hospital laboratories produce thousands of results daily. Each result needs to be interpreted against reference ranges, checked for critical values, and flagged for follow up. This is manual triage done by lab technicians and duty doctors scrolling through lists.

A creatinine of 5.9 mg/dL and a potassium of 7.1 mEq/L sitting in a queue for two hours because nobody noticed the critical flag is a preventable death. Hyperkalemia above 6.5 causes cardiac arrhythmias. That's the kind of result that needs to trigger an immediate phone call, and it gets missed when buried under 500 normal results.

Here is a script that reads a CSV of lab results, interprets every value against clinical reference ranges, flags critical results, computes derived values like eGFR, and generates a per patient summary sorted by severity.