Either as a patient or as a physician there’s a very high chance that you’ve ever got your hands on a simple blood test.

These range from very basic ones to complex ones with multiple pages and are substantial to any cinlical evaluation. Blood tests are probably one of the most performed tests in a clinical environment with direct patient contact. Also, if you’ve ever seen a typical blood test from the hospital’s laboratory then you’ll notice that they more look like a movie script than an informative medical report. Since the computer arrived in nowadays healthcare the form and design of these reports hardly changed.

Popular tech magazine Wired recently opened up a call for redesigning blood tests. Thinking about the design of ordinary blood tests, might just be one small step for patients but a giant leap for healthcare. They’ve called for new visualizations of common blood test forms and the amazingly skilled people at Information is beautiful won the first prize for Wired’s competition.

The goal was to re-design the report of a simple blood test that evaluated CRP and cholesterol levels. Here’s how the original test result looked like:

And here is how the re-design looks like:

Imagine the possible impact of such a report on patients. It would clearly help get the patient a much clearer picture of their condition and current physical state. The physician’s reward would probably be more of an eye-candy that helps getting through long hospital days, rather than an actual increase in information. Unfortunately the chances of seeing such new approaches any time soon on a large scale remain low.

Lukas Zinnagl is a physician and co-founder of MedCrunch, an online magazine covering health, medicine, entrepreneurship and technology all centered around new trends and the challenge of being a physician.

 

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