SCREENING MAMMOGRAM WITH COMPUTER-AIDED DETECTION
Negative with heterogeneously dense breast tissue reducing the diagnostic accuracy.

And I admit that without access to a good medical dictionary, understanding what that means is no simple task.

There are some systems, however, that take this into consideration and provide links to definitions of some of the medical terms, though this still doesn't solve the problem of explaining the practical meaning of the results.

Attempts are apparently being made to help on this account as well. Larry reports, for instance, that some medical institutions release records only under a policy that states that certain results aren't released electronically, but only manually by the attending physician who does this only after the provider has reviewed the records (including sometimes contacting the patient directly). A policy of this sort stems from what might be called the unbearable lightness of digital records. As soon as the results of a lab test has been verified, they are entered into the electronic records of the attending physician. There is no technical reason why, at this same time, they might also be copied into the patient's record as well. But that might mean that the patient (who is typically anxious and wants to view the results as soon as possible) might see the test results before the doctor (who is typically busy and has other, more pressing tasks to attend to) and then call up the doctor to discuss the result when the doctor doesn't yet know what the result actually says. Because of this possibility a policy that determines when lab results are copied from the doctor's version of the health record into the patient-accessible health record is necessary.

And of course, even with this rather convoluted policy, the end result can still be a patient blankly staring at the results and knowing that they're his or hers, but having no idea what they mean.