My wife's doctor is as methodically slow as they come. Under normal circumstances, as a result of his thoroughness and the near word-for-word recap of the appointment that he recites before dismissing each patient, you can always expect some extensive waiting room seat time prior to the moment that the receptionist finally shakes her head sympathetically and says: "The doctor will see you now."
As fidgetingly frustrating as a visit to this particular specialist can be, when you consider his 27 years of practice at the same location, affiliation with the local general hospital and a wall full of diplomas and accolades with skill and knowledge sets to match, the doctor is about as good as it gets here in our neck of the woods.
But now the frustration factor has been kicked up a notch as a result of "procedural changes" that are apparently beyond the doctor's control. Just prior to my spouse's most recent appointment (to which I tagged along) the office called to inform her that the doctor was no longer seeing patients at his long-time digs; that he had been relocated to a suite in the medical offices wing of the hospital.
We were also informed that the appointment would run even longer than usual (you could see the caller winking on the other end of the line) because "they" were making the doctor enter all of his ongoing appointment info directly into a computer during each and every office visit. Despite looking as nerdy as anyone we know, the good 60-something doctor turns out to be computer illiterate -- not really so surprising when you consider that he has always employed a staff of nurses and clerks to take care of the minutiae of the office while he does his hands-on thing.
The usual fidgetyness of waiting for him was amplified both by the significant amount of extra seat time as well as by greatly increased hustle-and-bustle in his oversized new waiting room that serves about half a dozen diverse specialists. There were usually never more than a couple of quiet adult patients in the old waiting room, but the huge new reception space, reminiscent of an emergency room triage area with a lot less blood and tears, is about as stress-free as the check-out line at a crowded supermarket on the day after the Social Security and welfare checks hit the mailboxes.
To be precise, it was 78 minutes past the appointed time before we were finally waved-in to talk with the doctor. Hovering over him behind his desk was an un-introduced administrative guy making sure that each section of the data base's "template" was being correctly populated by the novice medical bureaucrat with a brand new laptop that he may never know how to boot up let alone de-fragment.
On our way out, the office manager, who had already apologized profusely for the long wait, expressed her own frustration over her boss' forced computerization.
"This is all about ramping up for Obamacare, isn't it, Georgeanne?" I asked rhetorically. She rolled her eyes and silently nodded in the affirmative.
"They're going to have the ability to know exactly where you are and what you and the doctor are discussing...pretty much as it happens," I added.
"That's right, Ed."
After our lengthy ordeal and in light of the staff's stressful day I bit my tongue and didn't say what I was thinking. But you probably won't have to mull it over for very long to come up with a list of the things that have crossed my mind about the future of health care since our last visit to the bureaucrat's office.