How to keep an INR record your doctor can actually use

What to record with every result

A bare list of INR values is far less useful than it looks. A record worth keeping has five things against each reading:

1. The date — not the week, the date
2. The INR value, and whether it came from a lab or a home meter
3. Your target range at that time — ranges change, and old readings should be judged against the range in force then
4. Your dose schedule at that time, ideally the weekly total
5. Anything that changed — a new medicine, an illness, a missed dose, a holiday, a diet change

Alongside those, a record of which doses you actually took — not merely which were prescribed — is what separates a useful history from a partial one.

Why the notes matter more than the numbers

Your clinic already has your INR values. What they do not have, and cannot reconstruct, is the context.

An INR of 4.3 is a problem to be investigated. An INR of 4.3 with "day 5 of metronidazole" written next to it is an explained event that needs no dose change — because the cause has passed. Same number, entirely different clinical response.

This is the highest-value thing a patient can bring to an appointment, and it is the thing most often missing. Notes on unusual weeks convert unexplained variation into a pattern.

Presenting it at an appointment

Appointments are short. A structured summary is far more useful than a stack of raw data:

• Lead with your time in therapeutic range. It is the measure the service uses, and it frames everything else. Calculate yours free.
• Bring the trend, not only the last result. A chart against your target band shows in seconds what a list takes minutes to convey.
• Flag the outliers and what explains them. Two or three specific events beat a general impression.
• Be honest about missed doses. Nobody is keeping score, and a hidden missed dose leads to a prescription change that was never needed.
• Have your weekly total to hand. It is the first thing you will be asked.
• Bring a copy to leave behind if you can — a CSV or printout goes into your record.

Paper, spreadsheet or app

Paper booklets are what most clinics issue. They work, they need no battery, and they are trusted. They also get lost, cannot chart a trend, and will not calculate your time in range.

Spreadsheets chart and calculate, but require you to be at a computer to log a result — so entries get postponed and then invented from memory, which is precisely how the notes get lost.

An app logs in seconds at the moment the result arrives, when the context is still fresh, and computes the trend and TTR without being asked. The failure mode is different: many INR apps paywall the history or the export, so the record you have been building for two years is held behind a subscription at the moment you want to hand it over.

Exporting from Coagly

Coagly takes a deliberate position on this: your full history and CSV export are free for everyone, reaching back to your very first entry. Not the last thirty days, not a Pro feature. Your data is yours, and a record you cannot get out is not a record.

What you get:

• Complete history — every INR reading with its date, target range, in-range status and notes
• Dose history — what was prescribed and what was actually taken, day by day
• Calendar and list views for reviewing before an appointment
• Time in therapeutic range and adherence, calculated with the Rosendaal method clinics use
• CSV export that opens in any spreadsheet and can be emailed or printed

In practice: open Coagly before your appointment, check your TTR and trend, export the CSV, and arrive with both the summary and the underlying data.

Bringing existing history with you

If you have been tracking elsewhere, you do not need to start over. Coagly imports INR and dose history from CSV, so years of readings carry across and your time in range is calculated over the whole record rather than only what you have logged since installing.

Common questions