All Manner of Things

I myself, though you'd think I'd be inured to the phenomenon after having experienced it for years, maintain a certain level of incredulity about it.  Every time I contact some kind of medical provider, insurance company, or similar organization by their secure HIPAA-compliant email portal and receive a reply, I have some shred of hope within me that their answer will reveal that they are capable of communicating through text, both in that they will have absorbed whatever I wrote to them and that they will be equipped to respond in kind.  But in practice, this beautiful dream is the exception, not the rule.

They want me to call them on the phone.

They want me to do this even if I inform them that I am hard of hearing (it's meant to be an illiterate-person-friendly rendering of "audio processing impaired") and cannot have a telephone conversation unless it's actually important enough that I am having it with an emergency services dispatcher or maybe Poison Control (under which circumstance I will go into debt with myself and ask for things to be repeated seven times and cry if I have to but I'm not going to do that for anything else).  They want me to do this even if I am writing to the same presumable office, literal or distributed, that houses the phones.  It is somehow impossible for the same people who normally man the phone bank to have some of their attention allocated to answering written messages, or at least answering them in a way that involves reading them, i.e. with any content other than copy-pasted Help Center text which shares one point four keywords with my original message, followed by "please call us at the following number during these hours with any further questions."

Sometimes I run into someone who can read!  I got a letter in the postal mails not too long ago, which said: "I understand that you advised calling is not an option for you, but I am required to share the phone number with you."  That one even referred to a text chat option I could try, but didn't include directions to get there.  I guess because the directions wouldn't be a string of 7-12 digits with optional hyphens and parentheses?  So I didn't find this helpful at all, but they weren't required (by law? by corporate diktat?) to be helpful, they were only required to provide me with a phone number.

AIs are now good at many things some of the time, but they are apparently not so good and so efficient at phone calls that I can get one to make phone calls for me at a lower price than I can get a human being to do it, most especially because when I get another human being to make a phone call for me in a medical capacity, whoever they manage to raise on the other end of the line usually wants me to hop on the call and take over for them, no matter how beseechingly I ask, in person at the doctor's office, to please allow my spouse to be my phone proxy.

Once my spouse asked a provider, "What would you do if she were deaf?"  And, demonstrating that we also do not reliably graduate people for these workplaces with a firm command of spoken language, the reply was: "Good news, we found you a doctor who knows sign language!" - for, of course, future in-person appointments, which I handle in the usual way as long as nobody has too thick an accent, not for the immediate phone-related issue.  I think what actually deaf people actually do is use an interpreter service.  But while I took a sign language class once I retain very little of the content and would not benefit from it.

This is not a personal health information security issue.  I have gotten HIPAA certified - twice, actually, funny story, my employer at the time changed which certification they wanted me to get at just the right moment! - and HIPAA is there to protect patients, not providers.  Providers may of course reasonably respond to the threat of being sued for failing to meet their obligations to patients with conservatism.  (Though I wish they'd be equally skittish about my empty threats to invoke the ADA.)  I do not sincerely expect them to offer me a tickbox that says "CLICK HERE to have your medical information released to the public internet and live national television BUT you never have to fill out another for and we will stop asking you to call us" even though I'd click that with great abandon.  But this is why they have the compliant email portals.  I get opaque alerts that Someone Said Something in my normal Gmail inbox, I go click through and sign in, everything's sewn up tight and they can put all kinds of fun facts about my organs in there worry-free, and the Something that Someone Said is: