On Line Health Forms Should Be For Patients, Not Health Professionals!
Submitted by Dr. Gwenn Is In
We had an interesting experience today.
My husband is scheduled for a routine test tomorrow and was notified by letter that he had to register ahead of time for the test. The test is going to take place at our local hospital. The letter clear had instructions with the name of the test and department name as well as two ways to register: phone or internet. My husband opted for the internet route assuming that was the more straight forward option.
Now, as background, he’s a fairly medically savvy guy. Even without having experienced second hand my residency, he’s incredibly well read and very health and computer literate. And, he knows his way around the insurance system. We assumed this would take all of 5 minutes and be a snap. Read on!
With insurance card and letter from the local hospital in hand, my husband goes to the hospital website and clicks “register for test”.
So far, so good.
He’s then asked to enter his insurance information and notices the the information fields don’t quite match up with the information on his insurance cards. One field asks for information not on his card: group name or number. We took a stab in the dark that it would be his company’s name and since the system accepted the information and moved to the next screen, we assumed we were likely right.
The next screen was the actual test registration screen.
This screen asked him to choose the name of the test and department name from drop down menus. Neither his test nor the department the test will occur in were on the menus, and this is one very common test in one of the most popular departments of the hospital!! Perplexing and surprising. So, he opted to enter the information in the “other” box, which the system seemed just as happy with.
This experience left us scratching our heads. Clearly someone didn’t do their homework. It seemed to us that the insurance aspect of the program was out of step with the information we are actually given, and that the test and department information was not patient friendly. It should have matched the letter sent out verbatim.
I was very disappointed to discover that the biggest community hospital in our area, the one claiming to care for people from all walks of life, didn’t have in place a registration system that met the literacy needs of the average patient.
This isn’t unique to our hospital or our area. This is the problem with Health 2.0 systems.
If we are going to go high tech, someone must pay attention to literacy and it has to follow through on all levels, from the letters sent home to the technology we are asked to use.
Again, I’m very disappointed, but not surprised. Just another symptom of our broken health care world.
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