Why is your patient experience so infuriating?

The American sick care system of system is not just sick, it is incredibly infuriating and dangerous for patients.

Suppose you fell on your face on Thursday and were worried that you might have broken your jawbone. Finding the right doctor at the right time with the right competences that can see you and treat you without emptying your bank account is maddening, dangerous and frustrating because:

1. There are various kinds of doctors who treat jaw fractures: maxillofacial surgeons, ear, nose and throat doctors, plastic surgeons, and oral surgeons.
2. Each of those doctors may not specialize in treating facial fractures or, in fact, do not treat them at all.
3. Some do not take insurance and you must pay out of pocket, either because they are not in your network, they work for a hospital system that does not accept your insurance or, in the case of oral surgeons, you have a "medical problem", not a dental problem.
4. When you call to make an appointment, you are put in phone tree or bot hell until a real person answers the phone.
5. When that person answers the phone, they are poorly trained, do not have the information you need or refer you to another person...wash, rinse, repeat.
6. There is no data interoperability so the image you paid $200 for out of your pocket is not readable or transferable to another doctor in case you want another opinion or find someone who will take your insurance.
7. There are no appointments available, so you are told to go to an emergency room for an expensive visit.
8. Now that you have spent most of Friday trying to get answers and calling your doctor friends for help crash through the gate keepers and help you navigate the system, you are stuck in patient weekend access hell.
9. No one can tell you what treating your problem will cost and how much you will have pay out of pocket, "until the doctor sees you"
10. The "doctor" you eventually see for evaluation might not be an MD or DO but, rather, a nurse.

Sick, sick care system of system marketers are consumed with improving the patient experience. How about a process that gets the patient to the right person on the phone in 3 rings who know what they are talking about? Remember the phone? It's that black thing that you put to your ear and mouth, and it lets you speak directly to the person on the other phone, not on speaker phone since you are working from home on a computer with faulty audio and unstable bandwidth that drops you from the call so you can restart the entire process.

If that's not enough, here are some more ways to piss off your patients.

The worst part is we spend $4.3 T a year doing all this. Maybe AI will make all this go away by just digitizing all these lousy workflows.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entreprerneurs on Substack and Editor of Digital Health Entrepreneurship