Joe Bennett: Logging in to modern health system causes consternation

Trying to log in to his personal patient portal at his health clinic caused consternation for columnist Joe Bennett.

It’s hard to know which aspect of this little saga contributed most to the boiling skull. In the end it may have been the language. It often is. But let me begin at the beginning and in the beginning was the prostate.

How’s yours, if you are blessed with one? Mine’s the standard item for men of my age, which means that it is getting troublesome and is not going to get any less troublesome as the years accrue. Benign prostatic hyperplasia is the medics’ term and I take pills for it whose commercial name is thick with Os and Xs. The Xs in particular make the pills sound sciency and therefore enhance my belief in them and make them work.

Every three months or so I seek more Oxies from the local health centre and, being a modern sort of chap, I order them via the website. It and I have become quite chummy. It remembers my email address and password and my taste for Oxies and in exchange I overlook the term “health centre”. (Am I alone in pining for the days of a doctor’s surgery or a medical practice? Probably. The world moves on. And how.)

Anyway, this morning, I noted that my Oxy store had dwindled, so I went to the website and found it unrecognisable.

Holden Caulfield, the implausible American teenager, found comfort in his local museum because the exhibits were unchanged from when he’d been a child. But that is not the way of the world. Nothing in this universe stays the same. Everything is in a state of flux, part of the endless onrush of time and events and entropic decay.

As a rule, the young cope with change better than their elders. They have had less time to develop habit. They are more mentally flexible. We older folk may try but, well, the newly formed website had forgotten my password. So had I, of course, but there was nothing new about that. I took down my little red notebook in which I write down user names and passwords in good old ink on paper. (Should anyone ever steal this notebook they could snuggle into my life in the manner of a hermit crab snuggling into a shell. And if there are any aspiring identity thieves out there, you’ll find the thing on the shelf beside my writing desk, between the dictionaries and the Rottweiler.)

I typed in my password. The website was unimpressed. It urged me to apply to change it. Reluctantly I applied to change it. The website whirred for a bit, then invited me to type in my password. I typed in my password. The website was unimpressed. It urged me to … well, Kafka would have swooned.

I rang the health centre where the delightful receptionist told me that, yes, the computer system had been upgraded and improved and I was not the first to have problems with the new — and I am quoting — patient portal. Now, I may not know much about technology but I know that a portal is a posh word for an entrance. And the point about entrances is that they let people in. But I said nothing.

The charming receptionist promised to send me a link, which, if I carefully followed the various steps, would get me through the portal. It took a while, a bit of head scratching and a few words but eventually, I crossed to the other side and reached a place where I was able to do the thing that I had been able to do very easily before matters were upgraded and improved.

But the new portal wasn’t finished. “Welcome, Julian,” it exclaimed when I finally burst through onto the sunlit uplands (I thought I had ditched the name Julian and its awful echoes of the Famous Five when I left home, but it’s a persistent beast and has dogged me on official forms for half a century), “Start Managing Your Health Today.”

“Ye gods,” I bellowed to the screen, adding a sprinkle of exclamation marks and question marks to taste. “If managing one’s health is a thing — and I am not convinced it is — what the hell do you think I’ve been doing more or less unaided all these years?” And I would have gone on, but rages are not good for one’s prostate, so I went to the pub, which is.