How to ruin a good idea

I've been tremendously impressed how creative and inspired programmers have brought things to the Internet that make it so much more valuable than most of us could have even imagined. But programming is still programming and where there are programmers there will always be bugs and sloppy designs. The purpose of this post is to vent my wrath on the programmers at Kaiser-Permanente who probably thought they were putting together such a wonderful product. Of course I could be wrong. The problem could well reside with our wonderful elected representatives who cobbled together the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or HIPAA for short. The regulators who subsequently interpreted and wrote the regulations implementing HIPAA could also be the culprits.

I love so many things that Kaiser has done for its online patients. We can email our doctors, not we are ENCOURAGED to email our doctors and other health care providers. We get our lab results with standards and comments by our doctor. We've even gotten the results emailed to us before we got home from having the blood drawn. We can make appointments, cancel and reschedule appointments online. And we can order prescription refills online.

All these things work so well that when I read that Kaiser would now provide reminders for reordering prescription drugs I just knew it would be an easy, user-friendly program. Well, it isn't! They must have either scared themselves silly with HIPAA or outsourced the program to Elbonia. If I haven't written about it before, some day I will write about their high-handed response to my notification that their program wasn't working. They did correct that.

But this reminder system is almost laughable. To get a reminder for a drug, say Atenelol, you enter the first two characters of the drug name (AT) and the last three digits of your prescription. Then you enter the date you last filled the prescription and how long the prescription was to last. I thought they were being a little too "sneaky" in getting the prescription info and wondered if last 3 digits, 2 characters, and the last date the prescription was filled would really be unique. Turns out it doesn't matter. This program accesses neither your prescription records nor your medical profile. In fact I could use this to give myself reminders about anything that comes in 30 or 90 day packages and for which two letters and 3 numbers would identify it for me.

A real strikeout for this one. In fact, why should I have to enter any information. They already know what medicines I take, when they were last ordered, and how long the prescription is for. Why can't they notify me when their records indicate I am getting low. That would be a helpful program!