Laboratories

A directory that shows you the source of every line on it.

Most directories rank the businesses in them. This one cannot, and says so: nobody here has walked a specimen through these laboratories or held a certificate up to the light. What it can do is show what each laboratory has told us, mark it as told to us, and never round that up into a badge.

You have a test request

Search by the town you are in, the department your request names, or the laboratory itself. A listing tells you what is offered, roughly how long it takes, and whether someone can collect the sample at your home.

It does not tell you the price. No laboratory on LabFlow publishes one, and inventing a range would be worse than the gap.

Go to the listings

You run a laboratory

A listing is generated from your own LabFlow tenant — the disciplines you have configured, the tests in your catalogue, the collection options you have switched on. You maintain it by running your laboratory, not by filling in a profile.

There is no paid placement, no featured slot and no order to buy your way up. The list is alphabetical.

How a listing is created

A short directory that says where every line came from is a better argument than a long one that ranks laboratories nobody has visited.

Six things a directory is expected to have, and this one does not.

Each of these arrives in a directory without anybody deciding to add it. They are listed here so their absence reads as a decision rather than as an unfinished feature.

A star rating or a score out of fiveNever

There is no measurement behind it. A number that looks like an average of something, computed from nothing, is the single most convincing false thing this page could print.

Patient reviewsNever

A review of a laboratory is written by someone who has just been given a result, which makes it a review of the news. There is also no way to collect one without handling the fact that a named person used a named laboratory, which is health information about them.

A “verified” or “accredited” badgeNever

Nothing is verified. The certificate reference and its date are shown instead, so the check stays available to you rather than being performed on your behalf by nobody.

Featured, sponsored or promoted placementNever

The order is alphabetical and there is no mechanism to change it. A directory that sells position is an advertising surface that has borrowed the manners of a reference.

Prices, or a price rangeNever

No laboratory here publishes one, LabFlow’s billing records invoices rather than a price list, and the figure a patient pays depends on their request. A range with the right shape and no source would be read as a quote. The same reasoning governs LabFlow’s own pricing page.

Distance from you, or a map pinNot yet

This one is a genuine gap rather than a refusal. Sorting by distance means asking for your location, and asking for the location of somebody looking for a laboratory is a question with a health inference attached. It is a decision that has not been made, and until it is, the filter is the town.

A listing is generated, not written.

There is no marketing profile to maintain and no copy to keep in step with reality, because the listing reads the same records the laboratory already runs on. The only thing a laboratory writes is the accreditation it declares.

Run a laboratory on LabFlowtenantDepartments, catalogue and collection options are configured because the laboratory needs them, not because a directory asked. The listing is a read of that configuration.

Switch the listing onoff by defaultA laboratory is not published because it signed up. Nothing appears here until somebody with the authority to publish it decides to.

Declare an accreditation, or leave it emptydeclaredThe standard, the reference and the date. It is stored as a declaration and displayed as one. Leaving it empty prints “None declared”, which is a fact about the form and not a judgement about the laboratory.

State the turnaround with its endpointscollection or receiptThe form will not take a bare number of hours. Choosing which clock is being described is the whole difference between a figure a patient can use and one that flatters the laboratory.

Pause it whenever the laboratory needs toreversibleA paused listing stays readable and stops accepting requests, because a laboratory closed for a week has not gone. Removing it entirely is also one switch, and it removes it everywhere.

This is what a laboratory agrees to publish when it switches its listing on, written out so that a laboratory considering LabFlow can read it first.

Questions to take somewhere else.

A directory is a way of finding a laboratory. It is a poor way of deciding a clinical question, and it should not be the last thing you read before one.

Which test you need

That is the question your clinician answered when they wrote the request. A catalogue that lets you shop for tests would be a catalogue that lets you order the wrong one.

What a result of yours means

A number outside a reference range is not a diagnosis, and a reference range depends on age, sex and method. Results are read alongside the person they came from.

Whether a laboratory is any good

Nothing on this page measures quality. Accreditation is the closest available signal and it is a declaration here, not a finding.

Whether your result is ready

That lives in the patient portal of the laboratory that holds it, behind a sign-in. A public directory that could answer it would be a public directory leaking a person’s health information.

What it will cost

Not published, by any laboratory here. Ask the laboratory before the sample is taken rather than after.

Anything urgent

If a clinician has told you a result is urgent, telephone the laboratory. A directory is a slow instrument and this is not the place to spend the time.

Every listing here was published by its own laboratory, and says so.

A directory is easy to fill with invented businesses and slow to fill honestly. What is here is only what each laboratory chose to publish from the records it already runs on, which is why a new listing needs nothing added to it before it appears.

Talk about listing a laboratory What the system behind it does