Danielle, my girlfriend, has a migraine headache. She is lying in bed, sensitive to light, movement, and any other form of sensory perception. Thank goodness she can’t read my mind, I am a shitty caretaker. With this migraine being worse than the one before, and the one before being worse than the one before, Danielle, who is afraid of needles, has opted to track down a doctor to give her a shot.

The problem is, her normal doctor’s office is closed today. Any new doctors she would like to see require a three week wait time for new patients. That leaves us with a handful of emergency/urgent care facilities in the Portland area.

This shouldn’t be to hard to compile a list right?

Wrong.

First of all, the handful of emergency/urgent care facilities gets filtered down one more level to the places her insurance “allows” her to go. This is modern medicine living in the leader of the free world. Sweet.

I take my fight to the web. A few personal things; a) I don’t want to drive 30 minutes there and 30 minutes back, this isn’t life or death, it’s a headache that is really painful. b) I am not good at sympathy. c) I am looking for a phone number so I can call these places to find out if they take our insurance and if they administer the migraine shots d) I am good with the web, or so I thought.

First search, I go to google maps and lookup local doctors, nothing close. I look up physicians, kinda close. I call them up, they tell me that if I am a new patient, it will take three weeks to even see me. No good. So being one to make assumptions that usually help me jump a few steps ahead, I assume all small healthcare clinics are going to have me jump through that hoop.

Next up, hospitals! Urgent Care to be precise. I google “urgent healthcare portland oregon.” Two hospitals show up. One thirty minutes away, the other thirty minutes away. I live in Portland, and I know there are more hospitals than that, and I know they are closer. Keep in mind, all I want is a phone number. While the google maps results were dismal, the google search results were worse. No I do not want to sign up with your health insurance that is so conveniently bundled with your hospital! I just want a fucking phone number!

Ok. Calming down. I know there is a Good Samaritan Hospital and a Kaiser Hospital within 15 minutes of me. I search both of their sites. They look like they were designed and built by the same team; 6 years ago. I can’t find a phone number to save my life, thank god it’s not a life or death situation. On the Kaiser site I find a link that says “locations”, YAHTZEE! Click. Popup. “Download our brochure with all of our locations conveniently listed.” PDF pops up and it’s roughly 45 pages, but it looks nice. I scan the table of contents and find Oregon. Go to the Oregon page, no phone numbers, only addresses. Ughhh…

Next step, go over to yahoo and google the address. The Kaiser Job Board shows up and has locations with a list of phone numbers (never even thought to look there). I call Kaiser Central on Interstate and the “we’re sorry, this line has been disconnected” comes through. Fantastic. I dial the second line, it’s the Kaiser operator, she transfers me to urgent care. I ask them if they give the shots for migraines, yes. Super! Do you take any kind of insurance? No, only Kaiser Permanente. Lame.

I go back to Danielle, tell her I can’t find anyone to help us, or I can’t find their numbers. So let’s just go drive to the other hospital I know of that is close and see if they will give you your shot covered by your health insurance. She says she is ok and we’ll wait a few hours.

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So where did things break down? Maybe a few places. There site could have been more usable, better coded, and more thought out. An aggregate site for health care may be a solution. Ultimately this kind of thing runs rampant in the health care and insurance industries. They are completely unusable to the people they are supposed to be serving.

I’ve lived in England and have gone through Social Healthcare, and believe me, it wasn’t all roses either. Why can’t we pay one company a reasonable fee, be able to go wherever we choose, and get what we need?

As for the website, here’s my final thought: Companies need to stop launching sites and forgetting about them. A site is never done. It’s organic, there is always room for improvement. Do Doctors get their MD and then suddenly stop learning? No! The web is more and more the place people go to get information, if you’re frustrating someone like me, who is an advanced web user, then I can’t imagine the problems less advanced users are having.

Please fix your websites, all of you.

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