Just Throw My Lab Results Out of a Car Window

 

by Pa Rock

Communication Victim

(Warning:  The following is one of my curmudgeon specials.  If you are not in the mood to hear me bitch and moan about something that is of little import to anyone but me, and something which is well beyond my ability to control anyway, please skip the following and go play Wordle.)

Passwords and  user names!  My God, how I hate passwords an user names!  If something about me is posted on the internet, I should be the one to decide if it needs to be protected with passwords and user names and witches spells - and not some jackass techie who is just out trying to make cyber space harder to access for for his own job security.

Yesterday I got up extra early and drove fifty miles to a medical facility to have some important lab work done.  The people at the clinic could not have been nicer, and the lab tech who performed the procedure to get the information was a very capable medical professional who made me feel at ease and informed me what was happening during every step of the process.  The overall experience was exceptional, well worth the aggravation of the early morning drive.  As I was getting ready to leave, the lab tech told me that I would receive a call from my doctor within one to five days telling me of the results.  

It's a heart issue, and it's important, and I do want to know the results.

This morning I received an email from that medical group informing me that my lab results were complete and that they had been posted to my "patient portal" on the internet.  That was frustrating because I had very carefully and deliberately never agreed to that form of communication.   But I clicked on the link to the patient portal anyway and promptly learned four things:

1.  My standard password, the one I use for most things, was not the one I needed for the portal;  or,

2.  My standard user name was incorrect;  or,

3.  Both 1 and 2 apply;  and, 

4.  I had nineteen more tries to guess the right combination.

Please excuse my Ozark colloquialism, but that is just bullshit!  If medical tests are performed on me, I want to be able to access the results without spending half-a-day playing guessing games at the computer, and if my lackadaisical attitude toward cyber security means that my neighbor may find a way to view those results, too, well . . . let him . . . I really don't give a rip!   

If you have information that pertains to me and you need to get that information to me, please call - or put it in an envelope and mail it, or even put it in an email.  Smoke signals might work, or hell, just throw it out of the window of a speeding car.  Any of those methods would stand a better chance of reaching me than hiding the information in a password-protected patient portal!

Okay, that's all.

Stick a fork in me.  I'm done!