William A. Hyman
Professor Emeritus, Biomedical Engineering
Texas A&M University, w-hyman@tamu.edu
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Now I’m being a patient. I visit my provider at a major medical center. I subsequently get a text message advising me to check my patient portal for updated information with a link that didn’t work. The portal is an AllScripts product which is also the EMR being used by my provider. The text woke me up it turns out, although it wasn’t all that early by most non-retiree standards. The dead link is a complaint for which there are some web complaints. Except for the dead link such a text sounds fairly normal except that I have not authorized communication to me by text by my provider, by Allscripts or by the texting service which is CareNotify, a product of Healthgrid. When I look at my patient portal it clearly says communication is to be by e-mail or phone to my land line (yes, I still have a land line). And I did get multiple emails from the portal which also advised me to check the portal. Further my portal does not even have my cell phone number although the provider does know it because I was asked to confirm it at check in—at which point I should have been suspicious.
I follow-up the text issue with a call to the portal help desk, after getting that number from my doctor’s office. The portal guy says the text was not from them so he can’t do anything about it. Indeed, the portal makes no mention of the additional text service. I poke around at the texter’s website and then send in a message with my complaint. I get an automatic response of we will get back to you.
Back to my doctor’s office by phone and they say they will look into it further. Which they actually do, calling me back with the suggestion to reply to the text with STOP. This may be a standard thing to do, especially for one who might be text savvy, but the text did not provide this information, or any contact information. The stop message generated a reply that I have opted out, not withstanding that I never opted in. This message included an email for Healthgrid support, which I now don’t need—I hope.
So, an annoying, redundant, unauthorized text with a dead link, with inadequate further instructions or contact information, which takes some effort by me and my doctor’s office to track down and maybe stop. And we wonder why people don’t find this stuff helpful.