My husband’s doctor’s office. They never respond to the pharmacy for renewing prescriptions, the pharmacy tells us, and so I have to try to call them myself (because my husband isn’t good on the phone with English). It starts out normally enough (“you are caller number 3”) but if the wait time is over 5 minutes, you are shunted to their voicemail system. They never call back. If you press * as invited to leave a callback number, you are told that they can’t call that number. I managed to get all the way to “next caller” once and was still cut off when the 5 minute marker went by. I tried pressing 0 on the voicemail and was told that their voicemail was full and cannot accept any more messages (which I believe). So we’re going to have to go down to the office tomorrow and talk to them in person. It will be a challenge to me to keep my temper in check.
Other, hopefully worse, horror stories welcome, doesn’t have to be doctors, but no mega-giant corporate voicemail hell stories please.
Well of course. I don’t have any knowledge of how this office is managed, if they have a temporary shortage of people, or some idiot in charge, or what. So I described what I have experienced so far. Sorry if it didn’t suit you.
But blaming a dumb computer for what’s apparently a staffing shortage seems … superficial.
Although, as a guy who used to deal in phone computer systems, perhaps we’re using the word “system” in different scopes. I read “phone system” as beginning and ending in the computers.
If “system” to you includes the humans working in it and their management-dictated procedures then we’re talking at cross-purposes. Neither POV is per se wrong; they’re merely different.
And either way, that medical practice is flunking Management 101 and deserves to be expensively killed.
Note that I didn’t use the word “system” to describe it (except for the voicemail) and certainly not “computer.” I struggled for a word and came up with “setup” which I think at least includes the management part, the people who tell it what to do (or don’t know how to do that properly). You read into it that I was blaming a dumb computer, maybe because you think I’m a stupid person. I don’t think I am, but then what stupid person ever thinks they are?
Phone trees that bad can only be by design. It’s easy to make them customer-friendly, but that drives up costs, and evil businesses instead make them a deliberate maze in order to frustrate customers. If you hang up and don’t call back, that’s one less support case they have to deal with.
It’s just part of the widespread enshittification of our society and businesses Many have already switched over to AI voice bots too, which are even more frustrating…
In the old days, it used to be that mashing 0 somewhere between once and ten times will transfer you to a human, but that almost never works anymore. Instead, the phone tree will eventually hang up on you with a “Sorry, we can’t understand your input. Goodbye.”
In those cases, I wouldn’t try to go to their office… I’d just stop using that company and switch to another business. Are there no other doctors near you that you could use instead?
Finding a different doctor may be the next step. But we don’t have time to do that before running out of medicines, so we have to get at least these refills done.
Besides, I’m quite curious to see what I can find out about this, and what they’ll have to say for themselves.
It’s difficult for me to see that as any kind of intentional business model for a doctor’s office.
Just to mention again, this was more of a venting type situation on my part, and I did invite other (non-corporate) horror stories. So…
There is the slight snag that many pharmacies are now mostly automated and many doctor’s offices are not. Or are differently automated
So the pharmacy’s computer looks up the doctor’s office and sends them an e-refill request through one of the several competing medical e-records systems. If your doc is on the same system, their computer gets the message. If not, the message simply disappears into bit-heaven, never to be seen again. Then the pharmacy says “the doctor is not responding to our requests.”
It would be nice if there was a single unified e-communication system for data between various facets of the customer-facing medical care industry. But there isn’t. It’d also be nice if everyone subscribed to it, not just most people.
There is also the issue that back in the day of standalone fax machines, the likelihood that any two machines could successfully communicate was very high. Nowadays when both ends aren’t dedicated hardware, but are rather software running on server computers and probably connected to the phone system over VOIP, the success rate for any two machines to connect is much lower. So the pharmacy tries to fax the request to the doctor’s office, it fails after 2 or 3 retries and they tell you “The doctor is not responding to our requests”.
Finally when all else fails they try to have two humans talk on the telephone. And when the doctor’s office won’t answer the phone, then they’re really actually “not responding to our requests.”
That may depend on where we’re talking about - in NYS electronic prescriptions have been mandatory since 2016.The prescribing software must meet certain standards and that means that any doctor can electronically send a precription to any pharmacy - they don’t need to be on the same system. It doesn’t matter which of the many electronic health records a particular medical office uses - and I’m 99% sure that whatever system retail pharmacies use is not connected to any EHR.
Which doesn’t mean there aren’t still problems - now that Rite Aid has gone out of business, I know exactly where my problem was. It wasn’t that the doctor didn’t get back to the pharmacy or didn’t send the prescription to begin with - it was that the pharmacy either didn’t look into their system or just didn’t fill it until I called. Because I have not had a single problem with the new pharmacy. They even contact the prescriber for refills before they are due.
Many have already switched over to AI voice bots too, which are even more frustrating…