LabGenie: A Patient-Engagement Tool to Aid Older Adults' Understanding of Lab Test Results

Research indicates that patients are interested in receiving personalized and contextualized health information and tips. This enables them to be more actively engaged in their healthcare, which, consequently, can lead to better health outcomes. To promote patient engagement, healthcare providers are increasingly turning to digital health technologies such as patient portals to facilitate communication with their patients and to provide them with secure access to lab results, doctor notes, medication lists, and more. These patient-facing tools offer significant benefits, including enhancing the quality of preventive and follow-up care and promoting medication and treatment adherence, which is particularly advantageous for patients with complex healthcare needs, such as older adults with multiple chronic conditions. Viewing lab test results is one of the most used features of patient portals, but older adult patients with limited health literacy and technology skills encounter the most problems locating and interpreting lab results. Misinterpreting lab results can lead to mismanagement of chronic diseases and safety concerns, particularly related to medication management. Furthermore, patients with limited health literacy often encounter challenges in accessing personalized health information and articulating appropriate questions to ask their healthcare providers.

To address these challenges, this study will create and evaluate LabGenie, a web-based patient-facing portal with a senior-friendly interface aimed at enhancing patient engagement with and response to lab test results. LabGenie will provide tailored visual representations of lab results (e.g., with customized reference ranges and indicators of urgency) and generate artificial intelligence (AI)-powered personalized question prompts based on the patients’ medical information to help older adults clarify their understanding of lab results and ask relevant questions during follow-up consultations.

The specific aims of the research are as follows:

• Design, develop, and evaluate prototypes of LabGenie.
• Develop and validate the question prompt generation module.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of LabGenie-generated question prompts in improving patient engagement, perceived self-efficacy, and intentions to participate in shared decision making.
• Assess the acceptability and potential impact of LabGenie in real-world clinical settings.

Researchers will use an iterative, user-centered approach, building upon existing prototypes to create and assess a functional prototype of LabGenie specifically tailored for adults aged 65 and above. Since older adults are the intended users, LabGenie will simplify interactions and shift the burden of populating the tool by using a FHIR API to automatically extract and import relevant data from the recruited patients’ electronic health records (EHRs), including demographics, medications, medical conditions, and lab test results. Natural language processing and ontology resources will be used to match patient EHR data with trustworthy online sources about lab tests, and AI will create custom visualizations of lab results and context-based questions. Researchers will employ mixed-methods to evaluate LabGenie's effectiveness and user-friendliness for patients, as well as its potential impact on clinical workflow and workload for healthcare providers in primary care settings.

This study holds promise for reducing adverse outcomes among older adults by improving their understanding of lab results and bolstering their confidence in managing their chronic conditions while enhancing doctor-patient communications and facilitating collaborative decision making. It fills a research gap by focusing on designing patient-facing tools and visualizations tailored specifically for older adults, and will contribute valuable insights that can inform future research about digital health tool design and implementation to improve patient outcomes.