My temp has been creeping up. It’s only 98.8 — which is a tad warm for me — but it was 98.1 three days ago, and the trend disturbs me. So I checked the emails I’ve been getting from my provider, and they suggest a virtual visit with the service in the title. I logged in and created an account, then downloaded and installed their application. When that was done and I’d given them my info, they assigned me to a doctor and told me I was #33 in the queue (but they’d transfer me if another doctor became available sooner). Understandable under the circumstances. So I wait.
Somewhat over four hours later, the screen shows that I’m the next patient. Hooray! It stays that way for a half hour or so, then changes to a popup telling me that the doctor’s connection has been lost and “This visit is automatically ended” (to add insult to injury, the only response allowed was “OK”). When I clicked that I got a screen thanking me for using VCA, then was taken back to the login screen.
Okay, I have enough experience in infrastructure and telephone support to know that connections and calls get dropped, sometimes for no discernible reason. But if their software can recognize that another doctor can “see” me before the doctor to whom I was originally assigned, and transfer me accordingly, why in the name of Og’s furry jockstrap couldn’t it recognize the situation I encountered and transfer me to another queue (preferably in a corresponding position)? To me, this has all the earmarks of sloppy development and insufficient testing — specifically, failure to heed O’Toole’s Commentary on Murphy’s Law (“Murphy was an optimist”). So I’m stuck with almost five hours wasted and no clear answers as to what I should do next. If my temp is still up tomorrow I plan to go to one of the provider’s “COVID-19 Triage Centers.” Which I probably should have done today, but according to their guidelines I’m not sick enough. And if anyone gives me flack I’ll show them the timestamped screenshots.
To anyone who has made it this far, thank you(!) for “listening.” At least I no longer feel like hunting down the yahoos responsible for this travesty and shaking them warmly by the throat.
I decided I would foster a dog. I heard there was a need and I can’t sew to make masks, so I went to the animal shelter website to sign up. Holy cow, what an awful application. They ask you if you have any other animals and even though you answer no, the damn thing still makes you answer a bunch of questions about the other animals you don’t have.
We’re not very bright as a species.
I really hope you recover from whatever you have very quickly. Best of luck.
I feel your pain. I’m having a non-Covid medical issue and tried using the teledoc service offered through my employer’s health plan. They said there would be unusually long wait times, up to 3 hours, due to Covid. Well it’s the next morning now and I’m still waiting 12 hours later.
Depends on what his normal temperature is, doesn’t it? Mine is usually 97.8, so while I wouldn’t consider 98.8 to be dangerous, for me it is a mild fever.
Yes - and to piggyback, we also don’t know if he’s in a high-risk group. A high fever starts with a low fever, and most of us don’t get any fever from a simple cold. Maybe I wouldn’t be too concerned yet with a low fever of 98.8, but I wouldn’t begrudge someone in different circumstances for wanting medical guidance.
Background: I’m 72, which automatically puts me in a high-risk group. I’m also morbidly obese — from a clinical standpoint — and have been virtually all my life; notwithstanding that, my general health is quite good*.
My normal temperature is 98.3-98.4, so 98.8 is a mild fever. As I said, or at least meant to say, what worried me was the trend. I do also have an occasional slight cough, but for me that’s just background noise.
I don’t know if it really came across, but my main gripe was that the system apparently has no way to recover from the dropped connection. Since it evidently has the ability to shift sessions between queues when a different doctor becomes available, I find it appalling that the same procedure can’t be applied to an orphaned session. That’s why I blame the developers and testers: 40+ years in various IT roles taught me (in some cases painfully) that O’Toole himself was something of an optimist.
Anyway, my temp was back to 98.5 yesterday evening. I’ll do my usual check around noon and go from there.
Thanks to all who bothered to read, let alone respond.
*No, I don’t subscribe to “fat but fit.” I was just lucky to have inherited good genes.
I don’t know about your practice, but I will say that many/most doctors’ offices (particularly independent practices) are either just now signing up with telemedicine vendors, or are transitioning overnight from occasional telemedicine visits to seeing the bulk/all of their patients online.
Offices are bad and inexperienced at this, and depending on the platform they’ve gone with, the platform hasn’t gone through enough iterations to account for some of the issues that are cropping up with the massive uptick of patients using these tools.
IMHO, workflows I can imagine around a busy digital waiting room for non-scheduled appointments seem like they’re just asking for patients to run into frustrations.
Well, this is CHI Franciscan, not exactly a doc-in-the-box. And while this was my first attempt at a virtual visit, I believe VCA has been their telemedicine provider for several years at least. So there’s been plenty of opportunity to identify and correct the failure points.
By contrast, my daughter waited 28 hours between initial request and consultation via chat (she’s hooked into a different hospital group). But she obviously didn’t have to sit there waiting: the system gave her a heads-up in plenty of time to get back on before her session came up. The nearest VCA equivalent was a check box to send me a text when the doctor was ready, but absent any further information I assumed I’d have to keep the session live. And a couple of times it did threaten to kick me off for “inactivity.”
While I’m here, a clarification: when I said “the system apparently has no way to recover from the dropped connection” in my last post, I meant a dropped connection on the doctor’s end. If my connection had dropped I’d have been no end annoyed, but I wouldn’t have been nearly as furious at their software.