Lab Work

I have an appointment with one of my doctors in five weeks. So, his office assistant calls me to tell me I need to go to the hospital to get some lab work done. I ask her, “When should I go? Should I go a week before my appointment with the doctor? That would be in four weeks.” She says that will be okay. I ask her how to find the lab; she says go to Patient Registration.

A couple of days go by and the lab orders arrive in the mail. One of the orders says the test is scheduled for 6-7-16. Hmm, that’s not four weeks away, that’s just a few days away. Okay, 6-7-16 it is. I wonder, though, when is the lab open and can I make an appointment? I check the hospital’s website. It says the lab is open 24 hours a day. There’s a phone number listed for the lab, so I call them and ask when they are open. They tell me they’re open from 7 AM to 5 PM. Maybe they could mention that to the website designer. I ask how to get to the lab. They tell me to go to Patient Registration.

Now it’s Monday afternoon and my lab appointment is tomorrow. At 3 PM my phone rings and there’s a female voice. Someone from the lab is calling me to remind me of my appointment “tomorrow at 10AM.” I tell her, “I know my appointment is tomorrow, but no one told me it was at 10AM.” She says someone at my doctor’s office should have told me. I ask her how to get to the lab. She says go through the hospital’s front entrance, take an elevator to the second floor, turn right, and the lab is on the right. That’s pretty easy.

So as information trickles down from the medical establishment to me, the patient, my appointment time has gone from “anytime this month” to “this Tuesday” to “10 AM this Tuesday”, and my appointment location has gone from the hospital’s “front desk” to the actual lab location. None of this really surprises me. There is no evil intent to withhold information from me. Rather, a lot of people don’t know what they are supposed to know. It happens everywhere, I know, but it seems to happen a lot in the medical profession. Hospitals lose paperwork. Appointments are rescheduled and no one informs the patient. On and on it goes. One day the entire medical establishment will be replaced by robots. Maybe robots can get it right. And if not, well, they can’t do a lot worse.