Online KP.org password sign-up confuses me with other people with the same name, asks for data on people I haven’t seen for years.
Against the advice of almost everyone I know, I recently switched from Anthem to Kaiser Permanente for our corporate health policy. I know that it’s not an especially good time to be in the health insurance business, as all their spare profits being converted into fat wads of anonymous cash, being accidentally left under Washington, D.C. restaurant tables that congressmen just happen to be eating at … but I still buy into the conventional wisdom that “you gotta have health insurance.”
One of the features of Kaiser that induced me to make the switch was their supposed web-friendly way of managing your own health care records and doctor appointments. Well, that and the fact that they are (for California, at least) dirt-cheap. Anyway, since we here at Artesian Media like to think of ourselves as constantly connected internet smartypants, I figured Kaiser’s high-tech approach might actually be a better fit for our peripatetic lifestyle, plus I was more than a little curious to see what insurance companies consider to be “State of the Art web tools.”
I was impressed by the persistence of the doctors at Kaiser in pushing patients to use all these new web tools that have apparently been developed at great expense. This despite the fact that, as one worker at the big Kaiser mothership on Venice told me, “Without South-Central L.A., this place wouldn’t exist. Since ‘Killer King’ went down, we are the place to go if you are poor and live in Da Hood.”
[BRIEF ASIDE: For readers outside of LA, what she was referring to was the implosion of King-Drew Health Center in Los Angeles, after a series of excellent LA Times investigative reports chronicling how hospital workers mopped around the bodies of dying patients in the emergency room, committed absurd frauds to collect unwarranted disability payments, stole patient’s painkillers and got high on the job, sexually harassed co-workers, and basically ran the hospital like a Turkish prison & torture chamber.]
Anyway – I decided to try to sign up at the KP.org site. I entered all my private information (the insurance company really seems to want to be able to figure out every single thing that could help them track you down should you welsh on a bill, but that’s understandable – if unsettling), and then clicked to get my password that would allow me to access my own medical records.
But before I could do that, I had to pass one final gantlet: a series of questions that KP.org says are “accumulated by an outside contractor, and that I should know the answers to.” A kind of “This is Your Life, David LaFontaine.”
Despite the Orwellian/Kafkaesque overtones, I figured that this was going to be a cinch of a test to pass. After all, if an outside contractor was culling information from the internet to ask me questions about myself, well, how hard could this be? I checked over my shoulder to make sure that nobody was looking, in case there were any queries prompted by my accidental (*cough cough*) clicking on certain websites during my wide-ranging research.
Unfortunately, this process shows how flawed it is to attempts to determine identity via robotic online spiders. The first question out of the gate showed me how much trouble I was in – it asked me which institution I had a connection with. Unfortunately, each one of these institutions was based in and around Boston, a city in which I have never lived, but where another David LaFontaine is quite active. The next question had to do with where my ex-wife was currently living – listing her under a name that she had never (to my knowledge) used.
Once again, a question that has nothing to do with any information that is relevant in my life. I supposed I could have Googled this, but I only had 75 seconds to answer each one of these questions.
The next screen that came up basically said: FAIL.
I have now sunk lower than Sarah Palin. I flunked a quiz about my own life.
KP.org insisted that there were no “make-up” exams, and that any kind of password would have to be delivered through snailmail. Which, considering that my issues of The Economist are arriving torn to shreds, checks sent to our vendors are getting pilfered, and we regularly receive mail addressed to people living in completely different cities — is not a comforting thought.
So before we all jump on the bandwagon of “cost savings through modernizing medical records,” by all means do some testing of what exactly it is that we’re migrating towards. If I’ve already entered enough personal information to make it dead easy for any script kiddie to steal my identity and go on a spending spree — why is it that this multimillion dollar site can’t even figure out which David LaFontaine I am, and ask questions that are relevant to me? And BTW – David LaFontaine is not exactly a common name, or one where I run into a lot of confusion. It’s pretty unique.
Imagine all the fun that the John Smith/Jose Perez/Wen Chens of the world are going to face.
