Medical Tech Mayhem – Indulge Me This Slightly Off Topic Digression

Medical Tech Mayhem – Indulge Me This Slightly Off Topic Digression

In her 20+ years working in the adult industry, Calico has met many people she admires and in whom she has the utmost confidence when it comes to their professional obligations.

In recent weeks, the events of Calico’s life have brought an entire category of coworkers into sharper focus where he appreciation of their competence is concerned: Adult industry techs.

While all humans make mistakes and Calico has seen a few doozies where porn industry techs are concerned, the general quality of their work is such that she has never had to spend much time worrying about whether the programmers she works with will deliver good code, or if the sys admin crew will keep the servers humming along happily.

If she had the last several weeks to do over again — and let’s say a stingy Genie who only offers a single wish — Calico would LOVE to replace the healthcare-related tech systems she’s had to use with new systems designed by the same people who have helped her reliably serve online porn to the public over the last few decades.

What has made Calico lose faith in healthcare technologies and medical recordkeeping? Wasn’t the Digital Age supposed to make things easier for both doctors and their patients? Are they seriously going to weigh her again? Read all about it in Calico’s latest post: “Indulge Me This Slightly Off-Topic Digression.”

by Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com Porn Movies for Women and Couples

Read on…

I’ve been a lot less productive these last few weeks, largely sidelined by an injury I sustained in early September. It was nothing life-threatening (although very much quality-of-life-threatening, as I’ve come to discover), but I did have surgery to repair one of my limbs.

Of the many irritations I’ve experienced since injuring myself, right at the top of the PITA pile you’ll find my many interactions with the information-technology systems employed (or, in some cases, seemingly not employed) by the healthcare providers who have poked, prodded, scanned and sliced me along the way.

On the bright side, I have no complaint about the quality of the care provided to me by the doctors, nurses and other medical personnel. Obviously, that’s more important than whether the hospital’s scheduling and records-access systems work – which they largely do not.

The Revolution That Wasn’t

Let me back up a bit. About 25 years ago, give or take, I remember watching a report about a pending “revolution” in medical recordkeeping that was being ushered in by the Digital Age.

“Soon,” said the report’s narrator, who was probably an actor from some broadcast network TV medical drama, “you won’t have to fill out a long form filled with questions about your medical history every time you visit a new doctor, because they will already have all that information, stored securely, cross-referenced in a million different useful ways… blah blah blah.” 

(I’m paraphrasing here, of course – except the “blah blah blah” part, which did stand out to me at the time as both highly inappropriate and stunningly unpersuasive.)

Well, the promised revolution in medical record management has never materialized, something I have had the great fortune privilege to have to not notice over the last 15 years or so, during which my interaction with the healthcare system has been minimal.

What I’ve discovered in the last few weeks is that it is now necessary to answer the same set of questions even more often than was necessary in my previous trips to hospital. And while I can understand the utility of using a patient’s birthday as an identity-confirmation measure, having to provide detailed accounting of entire family’s health history approximately a dozen times in 21 days just feels a tad excessive.

And then there’s this business of being asked the same questions about my own health history repeatedly, often by people who work for the same clinic or hospital as the last person to ask me these questions. More galling still is the fact the answers to many of these questions cannot change, because they involve specific dates, specific maladies, specific medicines and specific times I threw up in specific receptacles due to a specific dextromethorphan side effect.

Making matters worse, I know these doctors’ offices have this information written down, because I personally wrote it down for them, each fucking time. What do they do with all that paper we scribble our answers on, anyway? Set it on fire as soon as we leave?

What’s the Obsession with Knowing My Weight in Real Time?

Another thing I noticed is that these days doctors like to weigh people, a lot. 

By this I don’t mean doctors greatly enjoy weighing people (although that would explain some things), but that they like to weigh people often – and in my case, at least, I mean unreasonably, irrationally, maddeningly often.

By the time I finally went in for my surgery, I’d already been weighed by six different scales in two different offices over the previous seven days. Then, at the hospital, they weighed me as I was checking in, prior to sitting in the waiting room. A remarkably efficient ten minutes later, I was taken back to the pre-op area – where I was promptly weighed again.

“You know,” I said to the nurse scowling at the numbers on the scale, “if my weight has changed substantially in the last ten minutes, I might have a bigger problem than this torn tendon.”

Evidently, I’m a Time Traveler

Another bit of data management madness that had me scratching my head was an automated email I received multiple copies of, each one exhorting me to check in advance for a follow up appointment. There would be nothing odd about this, except for one thing: The date of the appointment had already passed by the time I was prompted to check in. 

Not only that, but this was a post-surgery follow up appointment, which – by freaking definition – means it should take place after my surgery — but this “follow up” was somehow scheduled six days before my procedure!

I was momentarily excited about the idea of being able to travel back in time so I could preregister for the appointment that had happened a few days earlier. I was also confused, though; if I can travel back in time to do that, why not just go further back and avoid injuring myself altogether? That seemed far more constructive a use of my hitherto unknown time traveling ability.

I noted the email included a number I could call to talk to someone in the scheduling department if I had questions. This turned out to be news to the woman who answered that number when I called, who told me she had no record of an appointment for me on that day, no idea how the email system works, or why I’d received such a notice, because her department has “nothing to do with” the hospital’s scheduling system, its associated app, or the email that I’d received.

I briefly thought about asking her for some time travel pointers, but decided to save that for the surgeon.

Bring in the Porn Industry Techs!

Part of my frustration is that when it comes right down to it, data is data and I’ve spent the last 30 years of my life around people who do a good job managing, distributing, storing, securing and making use of data of all sorts.

Even the half-ass software company I worked for prior to my time in the online porn biz managed to avoid sending clients emails prompting them to do things that would require time travel. And the techs I’ve worked with the porn industry? They’ve managed to keep straight millions of records – and billions of pieces of data, once you consider all those images, videos and user data.

This is not to say I’ve never seen mishaps with adult industry techs. Hell, one time in the early days when sites were still mostly built on hand-coded HTML, a young woman for whom I’d just approved a raise accidentally turned an entire website into a massive text file with an uncareful use search/replace.

Such occasional blunders aside, I realize now that I’ve been spoiled by the competence of porn industry techs. I mean sure, they make mistakes every so often and their systems suffer the occasional security breach, but I have yet to encounter one who had to ask my date of birth more than once – and never has a programmer or sys admin asked me to step on a scale.