Trials of techno-medicine

Provision of medical services has become more and more sliced and diced to provide maximum profit for corporate providers, or so it appears to me.

Last week I accompanied an older friend to an appointment for a prescribed blood draw. The office was in a nondescript strip mall building. The entrance issued on a waiting room with rows of chairs -- and no human attendant. Just chairs and a large wall screen that flashed a series of messages.

A printed sign pointed to another small screen on a podium at waist level and called upon patients to "check in here." This screen asked for an appointment number -- a number which appeared nowhere on the paper notice provided by my friend's doctor. Dauntlessly, my friend ventured down a hall way and around a partition to find a human. That worker offered, resignedly, "just enter your phone number." Seemed she might have been interrupted by this question before.

After a bit of poking around on several confusingly designed screens, we found a place to enter that number and my friend managed to call up a notice of her appointment, offer her ID to be scanned, and also enter some of her insurance information. She never quite finished that part of the process, but eventually her name appeared in the left hand white column on the big wall screen, indicating that the office understood she was there for her appointment.

So we sat in one of the rows of chairs, all of which faced the big wall screen. And there was nothing to fix on except that screen, which flashed a series of messages promoting this for-profit facility. We especially appreciated the one above. So helpful to patients ...

Meanwhile, bloodcurdling screams issued from the back offices -- we'd seen a mother lead a reluctant child down the hall. This was not so much pain, we hoped, but terror. But it was completely unsettling. When they exited, the mother -- in the midst of reassuring the child -- looked around the waiting room shamefacedly. I tried to offer her some comfort.

Finally a human appeared to call my friend to come behind for her needle stick. She was taken to the same room from which the child-patient had been leaving. She reported she still felt the swirl of psychic fear in this antiseptic place. The tech was business-like; her blood draw was quickly accomplished. And then he pushed on to the next waiting patient.

There's no health in a setting like this; we're just profit points for someone. Would hiring a receptionist really hurt the bottom line so much?