Aug 08 2005
Your call is important to us…
Rant warning
Like B******ks is my call important, to you personally, your employer, or the company that contracted you. Throughput and money is important to the US Medical industry.
Do I hear you ask “What’s up with our normally good humoured Wendy?”
Is ‘time of the month’ interferring with normal service?
Could be… .read on and judge for yourselves…
My Dr. suggested I take 3 Hospital based tests. Urrggghhh. 3 separate forms. 3 different phone numbers to make appointments. In 1 hospital, 1 building. Each number took me to the same switchboard where I heard:
All of our schedulers are helping other callers right now… your call will be answered in the order it was received… please hold the line…<beethoven>…
Each call took about 15 minutes before a scheduler was free. Schedulers don’t, wont, co-ordinate appointments within the building. No conference calling or call forwarding. The last call ended with this unhelpful statement ‘we can’t make an appointment for you because your Doctor hasn’t faxed us the appropriate form’. They really couldn’t make the appointment on good faith and wait for the actual form to arrive. They couldnt use details from my copy of the form, held tightly in my sweaty palm. I could be trying to waste their time (money). I’m not really their customer. There is no clear business value for ‘good faith’ in such an impersonal system.
Patient centric? NO!
I phoned my Dr.
She’d wisely morphed into an answer machine.
I asked the machine to fax the forms to the scheduler then phone me to confirm they were received so I can phone the hospital & wait 15 minutes to make another appointment, irritatingly on a different day from the one I’ve successfully made. <take deep breath>
Franz Kafka? Modern US bureaucracy beats it all. An hour later after 4 phone calls I only have 1 appointment and at least one more call to make. I’m upset & there isn’t even anything wrong with me. Today I’m not even paranoid! I do cynically believe a large proportion of ’tests’ are the medical services way to make money out of insurances… …and people’s fears….
Why, why, why can’t medical services put the patient at the centre of the process… one phone-call, 3 appointments sorted by an adequately staffed scheduling service who are thrilled about coordinating so that you only have to make one trip to the Hospital & take only one afternoon off work.
It must be a nightmare for someone with a genuine reason to be distressed before they even pick-up the phone… ..to hear the unsubstantiated (insincere?) message of how important that call is to the Hospital…
Rant Over
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