Clinical information systems and healthcare patient portals are proving to be a significant waste of money. Millions of dollars are invested into developing and maintaining these platforms, often by third-party vendors, to provide patients with online access to their medical records. While the idea behind these portals is great in theory, the execution falls flat when healthcare providers continue to send massive amounts of paper copies through the mail, despite the digital system. This redundancy is both financially wasteful and environmentally harmful, especially when patients like me would prefer a paperless option.

Even more frustrating is that at my current health insurance company, I can’t even opt out of receiving paper copies. Despite several attempts to request this, I’m told there’s no way to stop the influx of mail. Now, I’m left with no choice but to purchase a $70 paper shredder just to deal with the overwhelming amount of unnecessary paperwork I receive. It feels like an outdated system where healthcare organizations are not fully committed to leveraging the digital tools they’ve invested in.

To make matters worse, the US Postal Service bears the burden of delivering all these unnecessary documents. This means taxpayers and other users of the postal system are indirectly subsidizing this inefficiency. It’s absurd that after all the time and money spent on developing patient portals, they’re not serving their purpose if the same information is just going to be mailed out anyway. It’s a huge missed opportunity for cost savings and sustainability.

For anyone curious about which platforms I’m talking about, my chart, Healow. These are the two that I have used. I’m sure there are many others, but Blue Cross is also part of the problem, they have their own custom proprietary software that you can log in and see your bill and all that stuff but they will still send you the crap in the mail. And cannot get them to stop

  • talEnglish
    123·
    3 months ago

    To make matters worse, the US Postal Service bears the burden of delivering all these unnecessary documents. This means taxpayers and other users of the postal system are indirectly subsidizing this inefficiency.

    The USPS is generally supported by stamp sales, not taxation.

    I suppose one could argue that it is government-subsidized on the pension issue that’s been in the news in the past few years. If you feel – and I tend to agree that this is a valid concern – that as the USPS shrinks, it’s going to come up short on covering pensions and that at some point, people who have a USPS pension are going to be pushing for taxpayers to pay for it rather than the USPS defaulting on it, I think that that’s probably a valid concern. However, in that case, the financial problems are a result of the USPS shrinking, so generating artificial load probably doesn’t hurt.

    Like, you’re paying for it, but it’d be via you paying higher fees to your healthcare provider, who then pays the USPS to send mail. It isn’t taxpayers.

    Now, I’m left with no choice but to purchase a $70 paper shredder just to deal with the overwhelming amount of unnecessary paperwork I receive.

    I mean, I think that in general, people should own and use a paper shredder. Most people get at least some sensitive documents, and it’s a good idea to make it hard to read physical documents before throwing them out. IIRC, case law is that once you throw out material, you don’t have an expectation of privacy covering it any more; this has come up in the past when police departments did warrantless searches through garbage.

    kagis

    Yeah:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_v._Greenwood

    California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35 (1988), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the warrantless search and seizure of garbage left for collection outside the curtilage of a home.[1]

    Even if you don’t care about police going through your garbage, anyone can go run off with your garbage and poke through it, and those people may or may not care about legalities anyway.

    That being said, I agree that one should at least have the option to not receive documents that one does not want.

    Blue Cross is also part of the problem

    kagis

    It sounds like Blue Cross isn’t unified, has different regional organizations, but it looks like at least some do have some level of paperless options:

    https://www.bcbsm.com/amslibs/content/dam/microsites/som/documents/statemedicare-paperless-billing.pdf