Missing Podiatrist

Typically, when someone misses a medical appointment, it is usually the patient. That is why I constantly get reminder emails, texts, and phone calls to remind me about upcoming appointments, or to ask me to confirm the date and time.

This morning, I had an appointment with my podiatrist. The time was scheduled six months ago, and it was a regular check-up appointment, plus also to follow up on the huge cut on my toe from last year. I realized over the weekend that I have not received any communication from the doctor’s office about the appointment. I did look at the St. Joseph Follow My Health (FMH) app, and the item was still listed however. So at 7:35 am, I drove the 15 minutes to the doctor’s office. When I arrived, I found the door locked, and window blinds closed. I knocked on the door a few times and waited. And waited. And waited until someone came out of another door and asked me why I was there. Turned out the podiatrist was out the entire week, but no one had notified me. The staff from another office (I think all the “suites” are linked) mentioned it was likely due to St. Joseph switching their system from Follow My Health to MyChart/Epic. Since I scheduled an hour for the appointment, and now had nothing to do, I drove to the nearby Tesla Supercharger and charged up my car.

Back to the system change, UCLA Health uses MyCharts so I have been accessing the system a lot lately. My nephrologist in Orange uses Athena Health so I have been on their portal for a bit. There seems to be a lot of different solutions on the market. Just go to “Add Another Account” on the Apple Health app, and you will see a huge list of different systems. There are literally hundreds of pages to scroll through.

I am getting a lot of notification from MyChart from St. Joseph as they are migrating old health data from FMH. It keeps telling me that there are new test results available, but it just a batch of old tests. Hopefully I can add the new MyChart account to Apple Health and have one place to view all my trended test results.

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About the podiatrist. Someone took down my name/DOB/phone number, and said the office will call me later with a new appointment date/time. Luckily it was a regular check-up and not something more important.