It’s Tuesday morning. Suzi receives another reminder from her primary care office.
“You’re overdue for your annual physical.”
She deletes it.
Another reminder arrives a week later.
“Your mammogram is overdue. Schedule your appointment.”
She closes the notification.
Then comes the colorectal cancer screening reminder.
Wonderful. Apparently, turning 45 comes with a subscription service nobody remembers signing up for.
It’s not that Suzi doesn’t care about her health. She does. She knows preventive screenings are important. She’s just frustrated by the thought of all the necessary work she needs to do to schedule all these appointments.
This time she opens the scheduling page. The first available mammogram is 5 weeks out, a Wednesday at 2 p.m. She can’t take that afternoon off, so she closes the tab.
Suzi hasn’t even scheduled the appointment, and she’s already tired of the drama of patient portals.
So she tells herself she’ll do it next month.
Next month arrives.
Nothing.
At this point, Suzi would rather receive a jury duty summons than another patient portal reminder.
But here’s where patient burnout becomes more than an inconvenience.
Suzi isn’t skipping appointments because she thinks she’s invincible. She’s avoiding a healthcare process that has repeatedly bogged her down with all the things she needs to do to just make time for all these screenings.
And she’s hardly the only person who puts things off. Some patients can’t afford the copays. Others can’t take time off work, find transportation, or locate physicians who accept their insurance. And some have reached the point where even making an appointment feels like more trouble than it’s worth.
Healthcare has a name for patients who don’t follow through with recommended care: noncompliant. Really, we are now shaming people by labeling them as if they don’t care about their health and wellness?
But is every patient who misses an appointment actually refusing care?
Or have we become so focused on whether patients follow instructions that we’ve stopped asking why some of them don’t?
There’s a difference between a patient who doesn’t understand the importance of preventive care and one who understands it perfectly but has run out of patience with the process.
Meanwhile, Suzi’s patient portal keeps sending reminders as if she is slow in the head.
Her mammogram is still overdue. Her other screenings remain unscheduled.
She knows putting them off isn’t a good idea. She also knows that tomorrow she’ll have to deal with work, bills, family responsibilities, and everything else life throws at her.
Healthcare can wait another week.
Except sometimes that week becomes a month. And that month becomes a year.
And something that could have been caught early might not be.
So what is Suzi supposed to do? Start small. Schedule one overdue screening instead of trying to tackle everything at once. Ask the physician’s office for help finding an appointment that works with her schedule. And if she’s overwhelmed, say so. There’s nothing wrong with telling a healthcare professional that navigating the system has become complicated.
But the responsibility can’t fall entirely on patients. Medical offices and healthcare organizations need to make scheduling easier, offer more flexibility, and stop assuming that every missed appointment means someone doesn’t care about their health.
Patient portals keep sending Suzi reminders that she’s overdue for an appointment.
What nobody seems interested in asking is why she stopped making them.
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