This article discusses the reference labs functionality of Panacea, which is currently in closed beta testing.

We encourage you to use this functionality and to provide feedback on it, but please bear with us as we continue to develop and extend upon it. Panacea's labs functionality is a little rudimentary at present, but it will continue to improve over the coming months.

Reference labs are those where lab results are emailed to you from an external (reference) lab. These are opposed to 'on premise' labs, where results are received from an on-premise testing machine, or where results will be manually entered.

Panacea's reference lab functionality allows Panacea to receive lab results via email (from the reference lab) and for you to assign them to a patient accordingly.

Many 'on-premise' lab machines support sending results via email and these can be emailed directly to Panacea also - just configure your lab machine to email results to your clinic email address, as detailed below.

In this beta version of Panacea's reference labs functionality we don't yet support the automated population of lab request forms - you will still need to complete and send request forms manually, but automated forms are coming soon.

Every clinic has a unique 'labs' email address in Panacea. This is the email address that reference labs (or your in-house lab machines) will use to send lab results to you.

Panacea will automatically process all emails (sent to this address) as inbound lab results. It will attempt to find a lab test number in the email subject line and, if it's successful, it will attach that email to an existing lab request. If not (i.e. if it can't find an existing lab request number in the subject line) it will create a new lab request with the inbound email.

Simply list this address as the 'reply to' email address on reference lab requests and the results will be received directly into Panacea.

Your clinic's labs email address is in the format:

[email protected]

Where 'XXXXXX' is a random, six digit string that is unique to your clinic.

To view the labs email address for your clinic simply navigate to Settings -> Clinics, click on the appropriate clinic name, then the Settings tab. You'll see the labs email address listed in the 'Labs' section.

This labs email address cannot be changed and should only be disclosed to reference labs for the purposes of receiving lab results. To prevent SPAM, please do not publish or otherwise disclose this email address to anyone except your reference lab provider.

Every clinic has a unique labs email address. If you have more than one clinic in your enterprise then you should use the correct email address for each individual clinic.

You can manually create a lab request when you send your lab request to the reference labs, or you can simply allow one to be automatically created when results are received via email. Panacea will attempt to attach inbound emails to existing lab requests (where appropriate), but you can also manually assign emails to existing lab requests if you need to.

To create a new lab request simply click the green '+' in the top right hand corner of the labs section, enter the required details and save the request:

It will appear in the 'Labs' list with a status of 'OPEN'.

Panacea won't automatically populate a lab form and send it to your reference lab provider yet, so you'll still need to do this step manually. Your form should have your clinic's email address (see above) as the reply address and should contain your lab test number (from Panacea) as the reference number.

Once you've sent the request, change the status of your new lab request to 'SENT', as below:

Inbound results (that are received by Panacea to your clinic's labs email address) will either:

In either case the status of the lab request will be set to 'RECEIVED' so you can easily identify results that have been received and that need to be assessed.

If Panacea is unable to automatically associate inbound emails with an existing lab request (if the reference lab fails to include the lab request number in the subject line, for example) then Panacea will create a new lab request containing the email received.

You can easily merge the received email into an existing lab request if required. Simply open or expand the lab request in Panacea and click the 'edit' pencil to the right of the email (under 'Results Received'):

You can then change the lab test number associated with the email - start typing the lab request number and Panacea will provide you with a list of possible options, as below:

You can then delete the (now empty) lab request that Panacea automatically created when it received the inbound email (in this example, LAB012).

When you've reviewed each lab request consider setting it to 'Completed' so everyone can see that it's been processed. Simply edit the lab request, change the status and save it again.

You can also add a note to the lab request if required.