At the cerberus II meeting I mentioned my dismay at the patient portal. I forget exactly who I was speaking to but they made it very clear I was preaching to the choir. I believe that. I also believe that none of the designers and coders on the project have had any significant illness and needed to use the portal.
Today, out of the blue, I got a voicemail. Not sure why my phone did not ring, but that’s ok. Here is the transcript:
Hi, this is Susan calling from the patient portal at the medical center. I was just giving you a call to assist you with the patient portal. If you are still looking for assistance or have any feedback you can feel free to send us an email. Our email is patient-portal@big-city-hospital.com. Have a nice day, bye.
Ok. Well, someone ratted me out. The only question I have is “Aren’t you embarrassed by your site?” but alas, I did not get the call and she did not leave a number (caller-id was an outgoing number only). So I decided to write an email:
Someone (Susan?) just left a voice mail saying that if I am still having problems with the site, or feedback, I should send you an email. Unfortunately she did not leave a phone number.
If you want feedback, you can look at this blog post, that talks about just a small portion of the issues with your site. You will see that names and phone numbers have been modified because my intent is not to call out your institution or your IT team.
https://disableddad.com/its-
not-what-you-write-its-what- they-read/
That was sent at 11:20 this morning. I noticed in the back end of the blog a couple of hits directly on the blog post from the hospital, around noon time. Then another at 5:01 PM.
Then this arrives at 5:12 …
I wanted to thank you for your email and incredibly valuable and timely feedback. We are currently planning a redesign of the patient portal and your blog certainly helps my teams efforts. Through this project we will work with the technical and operational folks to resolve the inconsistencies you have documented.
Please feel free to reach out to me directly if there is anything else you would like to discuss related to the patient portal.
With appreciation,
Alice
Director of Strategic Initiatives
Interesting, and it appears someone does care, kind of. I end the email trail (at least for now) with this response …
My goal with the blog is not so much as to give your institution feedback (since when I have tried in the past it was futile) as to vent my frustrations and let other cancer patients know what may be ahead. As you saw, I do not call out whose website it is. Much of the blog, unfortunately, is turning out to be essentially feedback for the hospital as you can see in today’s post and that is a tad frustrating.
I am going to turn around your last line and say … if there is anything else you would like me to discuss with you and your team, feel free to reach out. I have designed many websites over the years, taught computer engineering at a local university, etc. and am more than willing to share, but ultimately I don’t know how much time I really have left in the global sense; I am not into wasting it. But trust me, you want to know something (feedback, etc.) I will absolutely love to share. Or keep reading the blog, plenty more frustrations, many around the built in email system.
Enjoy the weekend, I greatly appreciate your note, and again, will assist with feedback or whatever as long as it will really be useful.
I am looking forward to see what happens. Let’s take bets on if anyone will want to speak to a cranky old blogger with cancer up his ass who may actually know something about something.
