Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2022-06-11 08:28 pm
azurelunatic) wrote2022-06-11 08:28 pm
Entry tags:
post-appointment survey, gastroenterologist
My GP referred me out to a gastroenterologist to make sure that some miscellaneous but specific pain was not anything too bad or requiring aggressive treatment and/or aggressive diagnostics. My first appointment was telehealth. They sent me a survey. Oh boy. (This also helps me get my thoughts in a row for a thing I have coming up in August, which should be unironically fun.)
Getting the telehealth link for the first appointment less than ten minutes until appointment time was stressful. No one explained to me that this is apparently normal, so I spent a long time fruitlessly searching my inbox and sent a message through the web portal to the people who do appointments. Then, seven and six minutes before the appointment, I got two emails and two phone calls to help me get logged in. [This was apparently the expected pre-appointment help call, and a bonus from the person who I reached in Appointments.] I'm usually confident in logging in to unfamiliar systems, but the lack of any information about how the telehealth works had me very concerned that I would miss the appointment and be blamed for it. You can help this by letting new patients know what the process is. Based on that experience, I would not recommend this practice.
There also appears to be no place to specify a preferred name, or give any gender identity information through the patient portal, and based on that I expect that there is also no place that preferred name or gender identity information would be exposed to providers, people making reminder phone calls, or systems sending reminder emails. I therefore expect to be repeatedly deadnamed and misgendered throughout my interactions, because this is standard in medical practices that do not have a place in the patient portal for the patient to enter these things. Even when patient portals do have places to enter this, unfortunately most reminder email software does not pull from the preferred name field, and this information is either not shown at all to people making reminder calls, or the interface hides most of the information at the end of a long field or under a sideways scroll bar. So my bar is pretty low. This means that during times when every little thing is going wrong and I am particularly sensitive to things I would otherwise brush off, I have to choose between getting aggressively deadnamed/misgendered and not seeking healthcare. I have not always chosen healthcare.
Dr. T--- was great.
Getting the telehealth link for the first appointment less than ten minutes until appointment time was stressful. No one explained to me that this is apparently normal, so I spent a long time fruitlessly searching my inbox and sent a message through the web portal to the people who do appointments. Then, seven and six minutes before the appointment, I got two emails and two phone calls to help me get logged in. [This was apparently the expected pre-appointment help call, and a bonus from the person who I reached in Appointments.] I'm usually confident in logging in to unfamiliar systems, but the lack of any information about how the telehealth works had me very concerned that I would miss the appointment and be blamed for it. You can help this by letting new patients know what the process is. Based on that experience, I would not recommend this practice.
There also appears to be no place to specify a preferred name, or give any gender identity information through the patient portal, and based on that I expect that there is also no place that preferred name or gender identity information would be exposed to providers, people making reminder phone calls, or systems sending reminder emails. I therefore expect to be repeatedly deadnamed and misgendered throughout my interactions, because this is standard in medical practices that do not have a place in the patient portal for the patient to enter these things. Even when patient portals do have places to enter this, unfortunately most reminder email software does not pull from the preferred name field, and this information is either not shown at all to people making reminder calls, or the interface hides most of the information at the end of a long field or under a sideways scroll bar. So my bar is pretty low. This means that during times when every little thing is going wrong and I am particularly sensitive to things I would otherwise brush off, I have to choose between getting aggressively deadnamed/misgendered and not seeking healthcare. I have not always chosen healthcare.
Dr. T--- was great.
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That, and the whole "of wait, Why is this not covered even though it's explicitly detailed and covered under the schedule of benefits" debacle that occurs because someone mis-coded it 'by accident' more often than one would think, or that "we are not paying your ER visit because their billing people didn't follow our process, but we'll make you be the go-between at the same time as they are trying to send you to collections for reasons un-explained in the letter."
The ER staff? professional, had a hella sense of humor for 4 AM, and had me in and out the door with appropriate medication, and overall Very Good. The billing office and administrative backends for the ER and my insurance? Not so much.
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