Skip to main content

Finding your way around

Signed in, LabFlow is one shell: a navigation rail on the left, a top bar, and the page.

The navigation rail​

The rail is built for your role. A technician sees the bench, quality and reference groups; a receptionist sees the front desk; a laboratory manager sees overview, operations, the laboratory and interoperability; a quality officer sees quality, compliance and procedure; a billing clerk sees billing and stock; a laboratory owner sees My laboratory, Requests and Account. Patients and clinicians get their own shells — the patient portal and the clinician portal — and platform administrators get the platform.

It shows only entries this person can actually open. A group whose every entry is hidden is not drawn at all, rather than left as an empty heading. An entry belonging to a module a platform administrator has switched off is hidden too, and its address is refused.

Every screen also has an address, and the user guide names each one, so a page not on your rail can still be linked to directly — access is still checked when it opens.

Below 1024px the rail is replaced by a burger that opens a drawer carrying the same entries. It is the same application at every width, not a reduced one.

The top bar​

The top bar holds the laboratory search, the theme control and your account menu, which is where you sign out.

The search box finds patients by name or medical record number, specimens by accession number and orders by order number, in your own laboratory only. Type three characters; the list under the box shows up to five of each kind. Arrow keys move through it and Enter opens the highlighted record. What you type is never put in the address bar. The Patients page searches the whole register.

The theme control​

One control, one panel, nine axes: light and dark, colour treatment, corner radius, density, text scale, typeface, surface style, motion and sound. The pointer is always your browser's own. Every axis is applied before the first paint, so there is no flash of the wrong theme, and the choice is remembered on your device.

It is available signed in and signed out.

Page tours​

Directly before the theme control sits Take a tour of this page — the same button in the same place on every page that has a tour. See Page tours and How LabFlow works.

Records link to each other rather than making you navigate. A result names its patient; an order names the patient it was placed for; a specimen names the order it came from. Following those links is usually faster than any menu.

What travels in a URL, and what does not​

No name, email or employee number ever appears in a LabFlow address. A person is addressed by a printable reference (u-1001), not by anything identifying.

Patient search is the deliberate exception: the search box writes what you typed into ?q=, so a search can be shared, bookmarked and reopened. That is a decision made with its cost understood — see architecture for what follows from it.