Has anybody else experienced the dead-end adventure of trying to navigate through an AI generated automated maze, where you cannot contact a real human being, and felt OK with that?

The tipping point came when I was required to have a referral faxed over to the audiologist in order to get an updated hearing test so I could to purchase new hearing aids. “No problem,” I said with assurance. And away we go.

Let me back up here by mentioning that the medical practice which I have been going to for decades has undergone four different takeovers with four different names, each one becoming more grandiose than the last. The first was named after the town where the original practice was based. The next incarnation was named after the entire region that their ever-expanding offices were located in. The third one had a whole new name which indicated that they “care”. The most recent takeover has a rather pontifical moniker, which gives the impression that they are the best choice. Each new merger presents itself with pomp and promises as to what they will be providing, yet each seems to be offering less in the humanity department. Each one absorbs more and more of the smaller, local practices, until there are now essentially two major players running the medical show in the area where I live. Every time the next acquisition occurs, it becomes more depersonalized.

Throughout these changes, most of the practitioners, and especially my longtime Primary Care Physician, have remained constant. There are some very good practitioners, that is not the issue. Up through incarnation #3, you were able to call the phone number that led to the desk of the head nurse who works alongside my doctor. Her name is Diane. She is amazing. She is so busy that you usually got her voicemail, but if you left a message for Diane, she would always get back to you. If I needed a new prescription, an emergency lab test, an appointment made or changed, a form filled out or even had a question, Diane was there. Diane made sure any necessary information got to my doctor. And if there ever was an actual issue, my doctor has always, always called me back. I cannot express my surprise and gratitude that I have actually received unexpected calls from my PCP if she was concerned – even if it was 9pm at night on a Saturday. This is remarkable. That is pretty much incredible quality of care coming from a practitioner.

So I needed a simple referral for the hearing test – this is an easy thing – and called the phone number for Diane, as I have been doing for many, many years. But instead of Diane’s message, it suddenly now trips to the main number for the entire big pompous-named 4th generation conglomerate, which is not even in the same building as my doctor. I dutifully followed the menu options in expectation of being led back to Diane, but it won’t let me get there. I do this again. And again. And again. I try all different menu avenues in an attempt to reach Diane, but it’s not happening. Please, oh please, just take me to Diane. The disembodied friendly woman’s robot voice keeps instructing me to either go back to the main menu or go to their website and make an appointment – which I don’t need – via that black hole called The Patient Portal.

Thankfully, I am already signed up for The Patient Portal, which, honestly, I have found to be rather useless. They have some of my information, but not all of my medical information. Some of it is incorrect. When you attempt to correct it, it won’t let you. And when you try to find out something in particular, that info inevitably is not to be found there. But I obediently go to The Portal anyway and eventually find my way to where you can send a message in order to procure what you need and they will get back to you within 48 hours. I do that. And then I never hear from them again.

I really need the referral, the appointment is coming up. I call a relative in the medical field to see if they can just fax a simple referral over to the audiologist for me. Something like, “This lady is mostly deaf, she needs a hearing test.” But their particular practice does not fax referrals, they can only be sent electronically. And the audiologist is not set up to take electronic referrals, they only do it by fax. Back to square one.

The brilliant idea to contact one of the specialists that I usually see for a checkup only once a year to ask for a referral occurs to me. The specialist I choose belongs to a different giant medical conglomerate takeover, which has an equally bad reputation of not following through on things. Yet with great luck, I get the voicemail to an assistant who actually calls me back and arranges to fax my referral so the hearing test can happen and the hearing aids can be procured.

Many weeks go by, and then one night out of the blue I get a phone call from my wonderful primary physician, who is very upset that she never received any of those portal messages until now. I vent about the frustration of not being able to get a live human being on the phone, of being disconnected from people in a practice that you depended on to be there, the hell of being caught up in an endless loop of disembodied voice recordings, the loss of being able to get to Diane, since they circumvented her phone extension. She tells me these big businesses use AI systems now. Nobody is happy about it.

I had heard rumor that my doctor will be retiring in the near future, as will the nurse. I tell her I need to get on a waitlist for a new primary care physician, and so sadly I will not be staying with this pompously-named, indifferent, impersonal practice anymore. It is a sad and heavy conversation and we both express profound regrets. We go way back – she has been treating me with quality and respect for decades.

I had to wait eight whole months until I could get a first appointment to establish with a new physician, who is in the other big medical conglomerate. This doctor has not been in practice very long at all and is younger than my children. This other medical behemoth is also known for similar problems and I’ve heard the complaints are just as many. As someone stated to me quite succinctly a few months ago, “They all blow.” But I am hopeful it will work out OK. It might. And there really is no other option.

In the meantime…….

I had injured my shoulder. The orthopedic practice in this area is a huge one that pretty much has the monopoly, with locations throughout the state. I look up the number on their site where it says Contact Us and call for an appointment, instantly getting thrown into The AI Loop From Hell. You cannot reach an actual receptionist to make the appointment. They keep referring you to their website, which I reluctantly head back to and locate the scheduler page to make an appointment. You choose the specialist you need, it brings up their availability, you choose the day and time and enter it. So easy! I do that. Yay, it goes through!

Maybe a minute later I get a text on my phone confirming my appointment – for a different day and a different time than I had signed up for. You cannot answer the text, as it is generated by something that does not accept a response. So I go back into the website to try and correct their error – but there is no way to correct the incorrect appointment, it will not allow it. So I try calling the practice to get a human. But you can’t get a human, you keep getting the AI robot telling you to go to the website. You can try different options on the menu, but they all take you back to the same place. If you try hitting O or #, yelling “Representative”, or if you scream at it (have you ever screamed at a phone menu in frustration? I’m guessing yes….) it disconnects you.

Eventually, after calling multiple times and trying in multiple ways, through multiple disconnections, I did get a live person at the Appointment option (actually “live” is stretching it; she sounded like she just rolled out of bed and it was a bother to answer the phone) who told me I needed to go back into the website and cancel my appointment first in order to make a new appointment. Why that is I don’t know, but I was told it was “Not Allowed.” Could she please then cancel my appointment and make the new one while we were together on the phone? Apparently she couldn’t – or wouldn’t. So I had to cancel my appointment on the website and then go through the whole dance again to try and get a live person on the phone a second time to make a new one. Eventually it was corrected. Eventually I saw the orthopedist, who is a very nice and competent guy. I told him about the ridiculously frustrating experience of trying to get to see him, at which point he shrugged apologetically and confirmed it’s a problem and everyone was aware of it. He did not indicate any changes would be made though. He treated my shoulder and all was okay with that. Until I got the bill.

The bill did not reflect the fact I gave them a copay on the day of service. I paid with my credit card. I have my receipt from the card and also their receipt of the original bill they handed me at the time. And yet the balance due on the bill they mailed me was wrong. So I called the number on the bill for Questions About Your Bill….where I got back into the same AI loop. Because you cannot get there from here. I went around. And around. And around. It would randomly disconnect me and I would call again. I tried every option on the menu. It referred me to their website. I went to the website where you could contact them in writing about your bill. After writing what the issue was, I hit SEND, but it would not go through. It kept telling me that the CAPTCHA was not working. It did not indicate anywhere how you could make the CAPTCHA work. I googled “CAPTCHA not working” and found this was something on them that I couldn’t fix. I did this for about twenty minutes, filling out the same form over and over again, as if something was going to change, a hopeless proposition. Got back on the phone and into the Loop From Hell once again. That useless, pleasant voice that goes nowhere. I screamed at it. YES! NO! and other things not so nice. It disconnected me. An hour of this.

If you read my previous post, you might see that one of my goals is trying to practice Patience. I was really trying. I really was.

Finally it seemed the only way to deal with my bill was to actually drive over there in person and confront a human face to face. The thought of waiting on a line at a window in a room full of people to try and find someone to correct my bill, when the billing office wasn’t even in the same county as the practice I use. was not an enticing one and could have very well been fruitless. As a last ditch effort I called the ortho practice again, hitting every extension, until by some miracle a live person picked up. She wasn’t from billing but she said she would get me there. I begged her not to put me back in the loop. She said don’t worry, this is from the inside. And finally I was delivered to someone in the billing office and my bill was corrected. I had Arrived. She had to listen to my frustration. I’m sure it wasn’t the first time she’s heard this, because I am hearing the same complaints from almost anyone I know that has needed to contact their providers, no matter what group they belong to, in different states throughout the country.

This is an epidemic of indifference.

This experience had me stewing for days. Maybe I’m stewing about a lot of other things in the world and this was just the tipping point. Maybe I’m just wanting to get up in their faces because I can’t do anything about anything else going on in the world. Maybe confronting this is not going to do any good anyway. We are all becoming just a faceless number. Do their CEO’s know that you can’t reach their practices in order to make an appointment? Do they know that you can’t even reach someone in order to pay your bill? I decided to look up Who Is In Charge of the orthopedic practice and let them know that.

When you go on their website, you have to dig pretty deep to find out who the big enchilada is, but I eventually found it through an internet search. It happens to be one of the head orthopedic surgeons. From his photo on their page, he sort of looks like a reasonable guy. There is no option to send an email to anybody on there, so I wrote him a letter, specifically addressed to him, outlining my experience, and the frustration not only of myself, but many others (if they looked at some of the complaints on their ratings they would see the same issues stated there). I wonder if he even saw the letter or read it. I wonder if he even cares so long as they are making money, which they certainly are. If so, I doubt I will hear back from him. If a response does arrive – which so far it has not – it would not be a surprise if it was written by ChatGPT or some other AI generator.

What is interesting is that whenever I do end up being able to have some sort of dialog with a live person who can direct my call or troubleshoot an issue, when the experience goes off pretty seamlessly or within reason, I am so incredibly grateful. It happens. But it is happening less and less.

I understand that help is difficult to find these days. Apparently many practices are running on almost skeleton crews. They don’t want to pay people to answer the phones or field questions, they don’t want to pay people a living wage and benefits when they can pay a company to provide a system of automated prompts and responses on the front line in order to deal with their patients. Perhaps they can’t find qualified applicants. Maybe nobody wants to come in and work at a desk behind a glass window for forty hours a week. I don’t know. All I know is it feels like one more example of our isolation, our removal from each other, another degradation of basic human connection and care.

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