Most modern EMRs will flag results like this. If it happened to arrive in the middle of the night like the author said, the PCP would have just been asleep. I don’t think there are systems for waking up PCPs for concerning lab results.
And nor should there be. PCPs are basically by definition for non-emergent situations. If the PCP was at all concerned that the patient had something that was an immediate threat, they would have sent them to the ER in the first place.
Having someone on-call to deal with routine lab results that just happen to catch a possible imminent threat would be an enormous waste of resources.
This would be enormously expensive. The number of things an EMR thinks are an imminent threat will vastly outnumber the things that actually are thanks to liability concerns.
So now you need an extra on-call doctor just to filter out the false positives, or the on-call doctor gets notification fatigue and ignores them.
Or in the best case you send a lot of people to ER in the middle of the night for no reason. Again thanks to liability concerns, but this time on the part of the primary care practice.
