Your care team watches a handful of numbers between visits — eGFR, creatinine, potassium, phosphorus, albumin, hemoglobin, and, if you have diabetes, A1c. The Labs hub gives those bloodwork numbers a home next to your food diary, so you can see whether what you eat is moving them.
A gentle note: KidneyPal records and charts your results; it doesn’t interpret them. The “typical ranges” shown are general adult reference ranges, not targets, and your lab’s own ranges may differ. What a result means for you — and what to do about it — is a call for your doctor or dietitian.
How It’s Organized
KidneyPal keeps one rule for every health number: log it from the Diary, review it on Progress.
- Labs (bloodwork from a lab report) are the exception, because they arrive a few times a year rather than daily. They have their own hub, opened from the Labs tile on your diary or the Labs card on the Progress tab.
- Blood glucose and blood oxygen (SpO2) are daily vitals. Log them from their diary tiles; review them on the Vitals card on Progress, which opens each one’s history and chart.
- Weight, blood pressure and activity work the same way, with their own diary tiles and Progress cards — see weight, blood pressure and exercise.
What You Can Track
| Marker | Unit (US / International) | Shown as |
|---|---|---|
| eGFR | mL/min/1.73m² | Typical range 60 and above (normal or mildly decreased); below 60 is flagged |
| Creatinine | mg/dL / µmol/L | Reference only — typical values differ by sex and muscle mass |
| BUN (urea) | mg/dL / mmol/L | Typical 7–20 mg/dL |
| Potassium (serum) | mmol/L | Typical 3.5–5.0 |
| Phosphorus (serum) | mg/dL / mmol/L | Typical 2.5–4.5 mg/dL |
| Calcium (serum) | mg/dL / mmol/L | Typical 8.5–10.2 mg/dL |
| Albumin | g/dL / g/L | Typical 3.5–5.0 g/dL |
| Hemoglobin | g/dL / g/L | Reference only — typical values differ by sex |
| HbA1c | % / mmol/mol | Typical 4.0–5.6 % (a general reference, not a diabetes target) |
| Blood glucose (vital) | mg/dL / mmol/L | Typical 70–99 mg/dL when tagged Fasting; other readings show the reference without a verdict |
| Blood oxygen (SpO2) (vital) | % | Typical 95–100 % |
Logging a Lab Report
- Open Labs — tap the Labs tile on your diary or the Labs card on the Progress tab.
- Tap Log lab results.
- Pick the date of the blood draw (it defaults to today; you can backfill past reports).
- Type the markers your report shows and leave the rest blank. Units follow your Lab units setting (see below).
- Add a note if you like — “fasting” or “after dialysis” is useful — and tap Save.
KidneyPal keeps one result per marker per day. Opening the same date again shows everything you saved, so you can correct a value or add a marker you skipped; the trash icon on a row deletes that single result. If your report has more than one draw on the same day (before and after dialysis, say), use the note to say which one you entered.
Values are checked before saving: enter the number only (“1.2”, not “>1.2”), and anything wildly outside what the app accepts is refused so a typo can’t slip into your history.
Tip: The eGFR calculator has a Save to my labs button. After you enter a creatinine, age and sex, one tap stores today’s creatinine and eGFR here.
Blood Glucose and Blood Oxygen
Glucose and SpO2 are logged like blood pressure — several readings a day, each with its exact time:
- Log: tap the Glucose or SpO2 tile on your diary. If you don’t see them, turn them on in Settings → Optional Tracking (the glucose tile is on by default when your profile lists diabetes).
- Review: the Vitals card on the Progress tab shows the latest reading of each with a typical-range chip. Tap one for its history and chart. Long-pressing the diary tile opens the same history.
A glucose reading carries a tag — Fasting, Before a meal, After a meal, Bedtime or Other. Only fasting readings get a typical-range verdict, because there is no single universal cutoff for a random or post-meal number; the glucose chart’s Fasting and After meal filters let you look at each on its own.
Latest Values, Charts and History
The hub lists each lab marker with its newest result and date. With KidneyPal Pro each result also carries a chip: Typical range, Below typical, Above typical, or See typical range for markers that can’t be judged without knowing your sex or context. Tap any marker for its detail screen:
- The chart (Pro) plots your results against real time — a six-month gap looks like six months — with the typical range shaded behind the line. Choose 30D, 90D, 1Y or All.
- The history (free) lists every result by month with its source: Entered by you or Apple Health. Tap a result you entered to edit it; the trash icon deletes it.
Glucose and SpO2 have the same detail screen, reached from the Vitals card or their diary tiles.
Logging results and reading your history are free. The typical-range chips, the Vitals card, the charts with their shaded ranges, Apple Health sync and the labs page in the doctor’s report need KidneyPal Pro.
Lab Units
Settings → Units → Lab units switches every lab screen between US (mg/dL) and International (mmol/L). Pick whichever matches the paper your lab prints; KidneyPal stores each value once and converts on display. New accounts default to US units in the United States and international units elsewhere.
Hemoglobin is shown in g/dL or g/L. If your lab reports it in mmol/L (common in the Netherlands and Denmark), multiply by 1.61 to get g/dL before you enter it.
Apple Health Sync (Pro, iOS only)
With Apple Health sync turned on, blood glucose and blood oxygen flow both ways — readings from a glucose meter app or an Apple Watch appear in KidneyPal marked Apple Health, and readings you type here are written to Health. Each has its own Blood Glucose and Blood Oxygen (SpO2) toggle under Read from Health and Write to Health.
Imported readings are read-only in KidneyPal. If one is wrong, fix or delete it in the Health app; if you’d simply rather not see a reading here, use Remove from KidneyPal on its row — that hides it in KidneyPal only, and the Health app keeps it.
Lab markers (eGFR, creatinine and the rest) are not synced with Apple Health.
Labs on Your Doctor’s Report
When you’ve logged results in the report’s date range, the Doctor’s Report gains a Lab Results page: a table with each marker’s first and latest value in the period, the change between them, and the typical range, with out-of-range latest values highlighted. Blood glucose gets its own summary (readings, average, fasting and after-meal averages, and a chart of daily means), and blood oxygen shows its average and lowest reading. The report header also prints your most recent eGFR with its date.
Personalized Guidance
Meal scans and chats take your health data into account — firmer potassium advice when your serum potassium is high, lower-glycemic suggestions when your after-meal glucose average runs high — but only if you turn it on in Settings → Personalized Guidance (also reachable from the personalization card at the bottom of the Labs hub). Nothing pops up to ask; it stays off until you flip the switch. That screen lists everything the meal-analysis service receives:
- Always used: kidney status, health conditions, daily limits, diet preferences and food units — guidance can’t work without them.
- Your choice, off until you turn it on: the latest value of each of your nine hand-entered lab markers (eGFR, creatinine, BUN, potassium, phosphorus, calcium, albumin, hemoglobin, A1c) from the last 12 months with the date of the blood draw; a 30-day glucose summary (number of readings and their averages — never individual readings); and your latest weight with its 30-day change. Turn the switch off again and none of it is sent from then on.
- Apple Health, off by default: readings imported from Apple Health are left out of the glucose and weight summaries unless you turn on Include readings imported from Apple Health. Apple requires your explicit permission before Health data reaches another service.
- Never sent: your notes, blood pressure, blood oxygen, individual glucose readings, and your name or email.
The service is named in our privacy policy, which also explains how it handles what it receives. The guidance never diagnoses or interprets your labs and never overrides limits your doctor has set in the app.
A Word on Kidney Stage
If a new eGFR maps to a different CKD stage than the one in your profile, KidneyPal may offer — once — to open your kidney status so you can review it. It never changes your stage on its own; that’s between you and your care team.
Labs on the Web
Everything above is also in the KidneyPal web app at web.kidneypal.app (available to Pro members): the Labs page, glucose and SpO2 rows on the diary, the Vitals and Labs cards on Progress, the labs page and custom date range on the report, and the same settings. Apple Health sync is iOS-only, so readings you enter on the web are marked as entered by you.
