Logging/tracking blood test results, (just) beyond Excel

May 5, 2014 11:02 AM

I have about 8 years worth of standard, and usually repeating (basic panels), blood test results. Right now I've got them logged in to Excel; I'm fine with having to enter results manually. At the least, I'm just looking for a format that shows side by side results by date for comparison and can be printed out in this format for health care professionals perhaps more cleanly than just Excel tables.

...I'd also prefer a desktop program or Chrome application, since my Android phone is not my tool of choice for dealing with data.


Does anyone else have a system for logging/tracking labs they like enough to share?

posted by blue suede stockings to Health & Fitness (6 answers total)

(I'm assuming these are 8 years of labs for 1 individual?)

I'm not sure how much cleaner you can get than a simple Excel table. Excel will let you format a basic spreadsheet into a table that can be filtered and/or sorted by column, or even by multiple columns. You could even start playing with pivot tables. (If you're interested I can email you a basic spreadsheet and pivot table to show how you could use it for some madeup lab values.)

If you want to show the range of values over time I suppose you could turn it into a line graph, again something Excel is perfectly capable of doing, even if it's a bit kludgier about it than other graphing software.
posted by Wretch729 at 12:26 PM on May 5, 2014

Response by poster: --Yes, these are results for just a single person; and they're mostly things that have to be evaluated in the context of a whole instead of individual items cherry picked out (i.e. CBC+Iron+Thyroid panels done on the same date)
posted by blue suede stockings at 12:27 PM on May 5, 2014

Yeah, then I suspect you could do what you want either by breaking it into a series of sortable tables (can even add in functions like AVG or COUNT) or with a pivot table. Memail me if you want me to send you an example, or you might be able to find a decent youtube tutorial (youtube is blocked at work for me).


Oh, Microsoft also has something called HealthVault which it bills as a wonderful way to keep track of all your health info. It's supposed to have apps and other bells and whistles, but I know nothing about it. It's a cool idea but I'm personally extremely wary of handing over my health info to a corporate giant like that... "If it's free you're not the customer you're the product" and all that.
posted by Wretch729 at 12:48 PM on May 5, 2014

Response by poster: I looked into HealthVault, and besides the creepiness of handing over all my lab info to Microsoft, another issue with it is that each lab result has to be entered manually, one at a time, along with the actual name of the test (there are no drag down menus--you have to spell out every single test).
posted by blue suede stockings at 4:36 PM on May 5, 2014

Their feature range may be overkill for what you need, and the bit that claims to deal with lab results might not do what you need it to do, but Practice Fusion are working in the health/data space in the US and they have some patient-focused functionality. It might be worth investigating.
posted by terretu at 2:36 AM on May 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

wellnessfx is supposed to let you add your own lab results, in addition to showing theirs
posted by typecloud at 9:00 AM on May 6, 2014 [1 favorite]