LifePoint Informatics builds white-label software that lets patients order lab, DNA, and genetic tests online, then routes everything straight into a lab’s existing Laboratory Information System (LIS). Labs add a self-pay revenue channel without gutting the back office, and paper drops out of the process almost immediately as transcription errors that used to slip through handwritten requisitions stop happening as often. The portal itself reads like a normal retail checkout, not a clinical intake form.
What is a Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) laboratory testing platform?
A patient can order a diagnostic, DNA, or genetic test without seeing a doctor first. That’s the basic idea behind a Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) laboratory testing platform. The software sits on top of a lab’s existing infrastructure rather than replacing it, so the lab keeps everything it already has running underneath.
What changes is the consumer side. A patient picks a test off a menu, pays for it on the spot, and the order routes itself into the lab’s system. Results come back digitally, usually faster than anyone calling in to ask about a paper requisition ever could.
That last part matters more than it sounds. Most clinical labs still run on physician referral pipelines built for a different era: paper requisitions, fax orders, phone calls to confirm insurance. A patient today expects to shop for a cholesterol panel the same way they’d shop for anything else: see the price, click buy, get a result on their phone. The FDA tracks this shift closely, noting that DTC testing has expanded access to genetic and other diagnostic information well beyond what traditional provider-ordered testing ever reached.
What’s underneath the friendly interface is not simple. Checking which collection tube a given test needs, confirming instrument capacity, keeping samples at the right temperature- none of that goes away. The DTC software just keeps it out of the patient’s way. A consumer browsing a test menu doesn’t need to know any of it; they need a clear price, a clear timeline, and a result they can read without a medical degree.
This is also why DTC adoption keeps climbing among labs that wouldn’t have touched it five years ago. Preventative screening for cardiovascular markers, metabolic panels, nutrition deficiencies, hereditary risk- all of it sells better when the barrier to ordering drops from “call your doctor” to “add to cart.”
How does Lifepoint integrate with existing Laboratory Information Systems (LIS)?
Lifepoint connects to a lab’s Laboratory Information System (LIS) through standardized data exchange protocols, mainly Health Level Seven (HL7) interfaces and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). These pathways carry test orders from the consumer portal straight into the performing lab, then carry results back out to the patient automatically. Neither side has to retype anything.
No double data entry
The old way meant someone in the back office re-entering information that had already been typed once at checkout, plus a second set of books to reconcile if anything didn’t match. That step is gone now. Nobody on either end retypes the order.
Updates flow both directions.
Say a lab pulls a test off the menu because an instrument went down, or changes which tube a collection needs. The patient-facing site picks that up almost immediately, not whenever the next overnight sync happens to run.
Fewer hands, fewer errors
- A requisition that used to get mismatched against the wrong sample usually doesn’t anymore; there’s no manual step left where that mismatch could happen.
- Diagnostic delays tied to a mismatched order get rarer for the same reason
- Most legacy LIS installations weren’t built with a cloud-based consumer app in mind, they were built to talk to hospital networks and physician offices, not a website
Lifepoint’s middleware sits in between, translating what the lab’s system expects into what a modern frontend sends, and back again.
How an order actually moves through it
- A patient schedules a collection or buys a test online
- The software maps their demographic details into an HL7 ORM segment, the standard format for an order message
- That gets pushed into the lab’s production queue, checked against whatever instruments are actually running
Getting results back
When the analyzer finishes, the LIS puts together an HL7 ORU message, an observation result. Lifepoint catches that on its end and reformats it into something readable, no HL7 background required, then drops it into the patient’s portal. The lab never has to manually push it through.
HL7 maintains the messaging standard behind ORM and ORU segments, and HL7 FHIR is the newer API-based standard most modern LIS and EHR vendors are migrating toward.
What features are included in a white-label consumer health portal?
A white-label portal has to pull double duty. It needs to sell tests to patients up front, and quietly feed the lab’s own systems with clean data behind the scenes.
On the patient side, that means a branded storefront, search that actually narrows down a long test menu, and a results area patients can log into on their own time. On the lab’s side, it’s the admin panel, order tracking, automatic requisition generation, payment processing, and the wiring into the lab’s electronic medical record (EMR) and LIS, all running quietly in the background where the patient never sees it.
Here’s what each piece is actually doing.
| Feature Component | What It Actually Does |
| Branded Public Front End | The part patients see. Styled to the lab’s brand, not a generic Lifepoint template. |
| Administrative Control Interface | Where lab staff add tests, adjust pricing, or update collection notes. No developer required, no ticket to IT. |
| Test Search Engine | Filters by panel, condition, or category. Barely matters at ten tests, becomes essential past fifty. |
| Secure Patient Portal | HIPAA-compliant login. Patients pull old results, watch values shift over time, manage their own account from there. |
| Order History Module | Follows one order start to finish: checkout, sample arrival, interpretation, archive. Nothing falls through a gap in between. |
| Requisition & Collection Directives | Spits out a PDF requisition automatically, plus the actual steps for using the kit once it lands on someone’s doorstep. |
| EMR & LIS Connectivity | The unglamorous part. Moves data between the consumer side and physician review, then into the lab’s own analytical software, no copying and pasting along the way. |
| Payment Gateway Integration | Routes through a PCI-compliant processor, so a card number never lands anywhere near the lab’s own servers. |
Skip the EMR and LIS connectivity layer, and everything else still technically runs, except the admin panel and the live storefront stop agreeing with each other within about a week. HHS sets the compliance bar for what “secure” has to mean for anything touching patient results, and that’s not a box you check once and forget.
What is the step-by-step purchase and registration workflow for direct lab ordering?
Direct lab ordering moves through six stages, starting when a patient opens the portal and ending with a notification that results are ready. No phone call, no fax, no paper form. In between, a test gets picked, an account gets confirmed, payment clears, and the order finds its way into the LIS on its own.
- Getting to the portal. The patient lands on the lab’s own secured site, not some generic marketplace, and starts browsing whatever clinical, genetic, or DNA tests are on offer.
- Picking a test. Each listing comes with a description, a processing timeline, and any prep instructions, fasting beforehand, for instance. Whatever gets chosen goes into a cart, same as buying anything else online.
- Logging in, or signing up for the first time. Returning patients just enter their credentials. New patients fill out a short intake form, then get an email with an activation code to confirm the account before checkout finishes.
- Paying. Card details run through an encrypted, third-party gateway. The lab’s own health network never sees the actual card number, just a token confirming the charge cleared.
- The order goes out on its own. Once payment clears, the system bundles demographic and test details into an HL7 message and sends it to the performing lab’s LIS, no fax, no phone call to confirm receipt.
- Results land, and the patient finds out. Once a clinical analyst signs off inside the LIS, the platform fires off a text or email automatically. The patient logs back in whenever it’s convenient to read, download, or print the official report.
Manual data entry mostly disappears across this whole sequence. The lab gets clean, structured data the moment someone clicks pay, not three days later when an accessioner finally types up a paper form. That’s also what keeps a result tied to the right patient once it’s ready; nobody is matching it up by hand on the back end. NIST’s digital identity guidelines cover the authentication standards most of step 3 is quietly built around.
How do clinical laboratories increase revenue through DTC software platforms?
Labs running a DTC platform pick up revenue mainly by selling tests straight to self-pay patients, sidestepping the slow grind of insurance billing. Cash comes in at the moment of order instead of weeks later from a claims processor. That’s also what lets a lab put idle instrument time to use instead of running below capacity most of the day.
The main levers:
- Self-pay revenue that doesn’t wait on a claims cycle
- Fewer billing hours lost chasing denials and corrected codes
- Reach into patients and contracts outside the standard referral network
- Idle equipment turned into something that actually earns its keep
Skipping the insurance billing cycle
Insurance billing is slow by design. Prior authorizations alone can take days or weeks, claims get denied for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the test was medically necessary, and reimbursement rates shift depending on the payer and the plan year. A DTC setup skips most of that. Money moves at the point of order, not whenever a claims adjuster gets around to it.
Reaching beyond the referral network
Geography stops being as much of a limit, too. A lab can pull in business from proactive patients well outside its usual referral area, corporate wellness contracts, elective genetic screening, deals that never touch a standard physician referral network at all.
Turning idle equipment into revenue
Equipment like a mass spectrometer, a hematology analyzer, or a genetic sequencer running overnight costs real money up front, and that cost only pays off if the machine stays busy. Traditional referral volume caps out fast, tied to whatever hospital system or physician network happens to be sending business that day. A DTC channel gives a lab a second source of orders to keep that equipment running.
A revenue stream less tied to reimbursement
A digital storefront doesn’t close at five. It’s open whenever a patient decides to order, which means a lab can run wellness panels, corporate screening programs, even specialized longevity or athletic testing, to anyone willing to pay. Less of the lab’s revenue depends on what Medicare or a private payer decides to reimburse this quarter, which is a different risk profile than waiting on a claims cycle to find out what actually gets paid.
How does automating specimen workflows improve laboratory operational efficiency?
Paper requisitions and manual transcription account for most of the friction in a traditional specimen workflow. Lifepoint’s platform swaps that paperwork for structured data that lands directly inside the LIS the moment a patient checks out. A barcode gets generated then, too, well before the actual sample exists, and that one change removes most of the typing a tech would otherwise do by hand later.
The two workflows, side by side
Compare those two chains, and the difference isn’t subtle. Five steps each, but only one version asks a human to retype something they already typed once. The other just scans what got generated automatically at checkout.
Where the errors actually come from
Handwriting causes most of the damage in the old process. Someone misreads a date of birth on an intake form, and as a result ends up in the wrong patient’s file. Vials get mislabeled, too; sometimes, nobody catches it until results come back for a test that was never ordered. Either mistake can turn into a compliance problem fast.
Lifepoint avoids this by generating the barcode and digital requisition the instant someone pays online. By the time the sample physically arrives, the paperwork already exists. A technician scans it, and the testing profile populates inside the LIS without anyone retyping a field.
The 30 percent problem
In a typical manual lab, an accessioner can lose up to 30% of their working time to illegible handwriting, missing ICD-10 codes, and clerical back-and-forth with clinic staff over the phone.
That number shrinks once the patient is the one entering demographic details and paying before anything ships. The ICD-10 code documenting medical necessity gets captured right there at checkout, not chased down later over the phone.
Faster turnaround, not just fewer errors
Peak accessioning hours are usually where turnaround commitments fall apart, because that’s when the manual backlog piles up fastest. A pre-verified sample skips straight past that bottleneck. A lab running this kind of automation tends to hold its stated turnaround time even when order volume spikes, whereas a paper-based lab would start slipping behind almost immediately.
What security data protocols protect patient privacy in consumer-initiated testing?
Most of the work happens before a patient even notices it’s there. Connections to the portal run encrypted end to end, card numbers get swapped for tokens at checkout, and nobody pulls up a result without clearing a second login step.
Encryption, in transit and at rest
A DTC platform lives right where the open internet meets a healthcare network, the kind of seam a single firewall was never going to cover on its own. TLS handles the browser connection, the same standard a bank’s login page runs on. What’s sitting in storage gets AES-256 encryption, so pulling the raw database doesn’t hand anyone a readable patient file. Underneath that, web application firewalls and network segmentation keep a problem on the public-facing side from spreading into the lab’s actual infrastructure.
Keeping payment data away from health records
Card numbers don’t survive past checkout in their original form. The instant one gets entered, it becomes a token, and only PCI-DSS compliant payment systems ever touch the real number again. A database holding Protected Health Information (PHI) never sees it. If either side ever got compromised on its own, there’d be nothing useful sitting next to it.
Tracking who touched what
Picture a tech pulling up a result they shouldn’t have, even briefly. The system logs that access automatically, timestamped, tied to that tech’s account, available to whoever’s running the next compliance audit. Nobody has to remember to write it down, and nothing about catching it depends on the tech disclosing it themselves.
Limiting what each person can actually see
Take a single order moving through the system. A lab tech working that sample sees the specimen label and the test code, nothing about who’s paying or what it costs. Whoever’s running billing pulls up the transaction record, but the clinical details aren’t part of what they can see. The person keeping the servers online has access to neither, by design, not because anyone’s hiding something from them specifically. Patients sit outside all of that internal structure entirely, reaching only their own results, and only once a second login factor confirms it’s actually them.
HHS’s Security Rule is the baseline this gets measured against, and OCR hasn’t been loosening enforcement: reported large health data breaches jumped more than 100 percent between 2018 and 2023.
Technical Acronym Glossary
API (Application Programming Interface): Two pieces of software need to swap data; that’s what this makes possible, no person manually moving information between them.
CPOE (Computerized Physician Order Entry): Providers enter medical instructions and treatment plans through this, including lab work and radiology orders, instead of writing them by hand.
DTC (Direct-to-Consumer): Selling tests straight to the patient, no insurance company or physician referral required first.
EHR (Electronic Health Record): A patient’s full medical history, accessible across different providers and care settings instead of locked inside one office’s filing system.
EMR (Electronic Medical Record): Same idea, narrower scope. A digital chart that lives inside a single practice rather than traveling with the patient everywhere they go.
FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources): HL7 built this as the faster, API-based successor to older message-based data exchange standards.
HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act): Federal law, not optional, setting the baseline for protecting patient health information from unauthorized disclosure.
HL7 (Health Level Seven): Healthcare software systems use this international standard to exchange clinical and administrative data with each other.
LIS (Laboratory Information System): The system underneath a lab’s daily operations, tracking specimens and tying results back to the right order.
PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard): Handles credit card data, and these are the security requirements that come with it.
PHI (Protected Health Information): Personal details inside a medical record- demographic, geographic, clinical- anything that could identify the person it belongs to, falls under this.
PSC (Patient Service Center): A separate site, away from a hospital or physician’s office, where patients go to get blood drawn or specimens collected before testing happens.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does adding a DTC platform require replacing our existing LIS?
No, and that’s usually the first concern a lab raises. Lifepoint’s middleware connects through HL7 or FHIR to whatever’s already running. No rip-and-replace required.
How long does it take to get a DTC portal live?
Depends mostly on two things: how customized the storefront needs to be, and how standard the existing LIS integration already is. A lab on a fairly conventional HL7 setup moves faster than one running a heavily modified legacy system.
What kinds of tests actually get sold through a DTC channel?
Wellness and screening panels make up most of it right now, cardiovascular markers, metabolic testing, nutrition deficiencies, plus DNA and genetic tests. FDA review status varies by test. Some go through a full review, plenty don’t.
Does a patient’s card number ever reach the lab’s own health records system?
It shouldn’t, by design. Tokenization keeps the actual number isolated inside the payment processor, and the health records database only ever sees a confirmation that the charge went through.
Who follows up on an abnormal or urgent result ordered through the portal?
That’s up to how the lab sets up its review process. Some labs route flagged results to a physician automatically, others leave it to the patient to bring the result to their own doctor. The software itself isn’t making that clinical call.
Is a physician’s order required before a patient can buy a DTC test?
Not for tests cleared for direct-to-consumer sale. A patient orders and schedules collection on their own, though plenty still end up back in a doctor’s office afterward trying to make sense of what the result means.
Does running a DTC channel mean hiring more staff?
Not typically. The automation in the ordering and accessioning workflow is what lets existing staff absorb a higher order volume without a proportional headcount increase.
