I think it’s a beautiful site, well-designed, user-friendly–at least, that’s what I would have thought if I’d started looking at it on my laptop. Unfortunately, I started out from my iPhone. Too much of HealthCare.gov is Flash. Not iPhone/iPad friendly.

Otherwise, yeah, great job. Maybe they should launch a mobile version. With no Flash.

“As a part of the Health Reform legislation requirements, we are releasing a
portal to provide health insurance information to the public. The goal is
for it to assist individuals looking for insurance, and also looking for
information about coverages. It is in development to add additional
information, such as information on actual private market plans including
benefits with cost-sharing and base premiums, as well as more detail on the
new high risk pool program as premiums and benefits are defined. Gathering
the data to put this website together has been a Herculean effort, and I
know that you as librarians understand that!! The July 1 release pulls
together as much as could be done in a short deadline, since the deadlines
were not adjusted as the bill took longer and longer to pass!! I do
believe that you will find valuable information for yourselves and your
library users, however – even today – the release date. The information
concerning Medicaid, CHIP, and High Risk Pools is more developed than the
areas involving private insurance coverage at this point, but there is a lot
of good information at the site.”

Note also that a Boston-area company, Percussion Software (www.percussion.com), provided content management software for the site and “The entire project – including design, content, integrating health insurance plan data from thousands of sources, application development, and implementing the Percussion web content management system – was built in 90 days.”

Impressive. And it shows that a better user experience is possible!

Trying to be helpful, I told the clerk that the website was wrong, and asked how I could report it. “What do you mean?” she asked, nicely. “So they can fix it,” I said. Reply: “Fix the website? I don’t understand.” “Never mind…”

Here’s everything I can see about that visit (which involved three issues, btw, plus treatment to freeze the lesion off):

   09/30/09   Outpatient    ACTINIC KERATOSIS

No indication of who the doctor was or anything else.

I called the “find a doctor” number from the website, and all the guy there could do was give me the phone numbers of the two offices that have dermatologists – neither he nor the website had info on appointments. Bleah.

I called back and they looked up the appointment in the records THEY can see. I sure wish they’d open that up to us – it would, obviously, reduce their costs.
_________

Grumpy today, ain’t I? It’s partially because I just saw a great health info website, healthcare.gov, so I’m newly impatient with things in healthcare that I know don’t have to be so inferior to other industries.

I mean, if the Obama administration can develop something that good in less than a year, I know private organizations can achieve it. Right?

Ugh.

(I know why this is; I’ve inquired about it in the past. It’s because, as at most hospitals, the doctors are independent businesses, not employees, and they don’t have to offer patients that service if they don’t want to.)

Ugh. How disempowering to me, and what crappy customer service.

(I know the people from Mayo, Kaiser, Cleveland Clinic etc are gloating at this, as well they should. This is stupid, and the only reason it persists is because patient empowerment isn’t important enough yet in the culture.)

Ugh.

I hope the 12-month study will be able to capture the kind of anecdote you’ve shared, as they may reveal useful and potentially useful features to include in a system for supporting a more open collaboration between doctors and the people they examine / treat.