It’s Monday morning. Suzi has a job. Apparently she has another one nobody told her about: managing her healthcare.
It starts innocently enough. She needs to schedule an appointment with a specialist. One appointment. How hard could that be?
Suzi calls the specialist’s office. “We need a referral from your primary care physician.” Fine. She calls her PCP. “We already sent it.” Great. She calls the specialist back. “We don’t have it.” Of course they don’t.
Forty-five minutes later, Suzi has coordinated communication between two medical offices that apparently cannot communicate with each other, and somehow she’s become the messenger. Nobody hired her. Nobody trained her. Nobody is paying her. Congratulations, Suzi, you’re now the referral coordinator. It’s 10:17 AM.
While she waits on that, she remembers her prescription refill still hasn’t gone through. Turns out it needs prior authorization. Nobody informed anyone. It was apparently just sitting there, waiting for someone to notice it existed.
By lunch, Suzi has logged about eleven minutes of actual work at the job that pays her.
Then a $347 statement from the PCP arrives via email. She already paid the copay. Insurance processed the visit. So what is this? She calls the number on the statement, gets through the hold music, and learns it’s from the lab; insurance denied part of it over the wrong diagnosis code. Who has to fix that? The physician’s office. Guess who calls them. Suzi. Another promotion: billing liaison. At this point all she’s missing is an employee badge.
Healthcare calls this “patient engagement.” Patients should participate in their care. Patients should understand their benefits. Patients should follow up on referrals. Patients should advocate for themselves. Fine. But at what point does being involved in your healthcare turn into working an unpaid administrative job inside it?
Because Suzi isn’t making medical decisions. She’s chasing paperwork. She’s moving information between businesses that won’t talk to each other, correcting errors she didn’t make, checking whether one company received something another company swears it sent. That used to happen behind a front desk. Now it happens on her lunch break.
Patient burnout doesn’t always start with a frightening diagnosis. Sometimes you’re perfectly capable of handling your actual condition; it’s everything wrapped around it that wears you down. The calls. The referrals. The authorizations. The bills. The same date of birth, repeated to seven different people.
Eventually you stop feeling like a patient and start feeling like the project manager for a healthcare system that doesn’t know you’re running the project. And that’s when something changes. Maybe you don’t schedule the follow-up right away. Maybe the bill sits unopened another week. Maybe you don’t call about the referral a fifth time.
Healthcare might call that disengagement. Maybe the patient is just exhausted. There’s a difference.
By the end of the day, the specialist appointment is finally scheduled. The prescription is still waiting on authorization. The lab bill still needs correcting. Tomorrow, Suzi will try again, because that’s what patients do. They keep calling, keep following up, keep fixing things nobody else will.
Until eventually, some of them don’t. Not because they stopped caring about their health. Because managing it became another job.
At least the one that pays her comes with a paycheck.
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