Why medical lab results should not live in PDFs

Why medical lab results should not live in PDFs Every year millions of people receive blood test results. Most of those results arrive as PDF documents . A typical workflow looks like this: Visit a clinic Receive a PDF report by email or through a patient portal Look at the numbers once Archive the document somewhere Six months later another PDF arrives, and the process repeats. At first glance this seems reasonable. But there is a structural problem. Health data is stored as snapshots, not timelines Medical lab systems usually present results as individual reports , not as a historical dataset. So people see something like this: Ferritin: 75 Reference range: 30–300 A year later: Ferritin: 60 Reference range: 30–300 Still “within range”. Another year later: Ferritin: 45 Reference range: 30–300 Still technically normal. But if you look at the trend , something very different appears: 75 → 60 → 45 Iron stores are clearly declining. The problem is that most people never see the trend. Bec