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Not to pick on you since this seems like a common category of problem... but the task is entirely artificial. There's no technical reason renewing a prescription requires you to do anything more than log into your pharmacy somehow and click a "renew" button. Any further complexity is because the pharmacy decided to waste your time.
I feel like I often hear people suggest using AI to navigate some unnecessary complexity like that, when what you actually need is systems that don't suck. Or at least being allowed to have third-party systems exist that work around them sucking. AI doesn't really have anything to do with it. If someone comes up with an AI bot that works around the poor design, people will come up with even worse designs to counter that.
Yes.
YES.
YOU'D THINK THAT.
But you click the 'renew' button and the Pharmacy reports that you have to get a new scrip from your physician. Well okay. You call the physicians office and they say you need to submit proof of your identity sufficient to make sure they're writing it for the right person. E-mail won't do, they need it faxed or you can stop by in person. Then once that's done, they will forward the scrip to the pharmacy. But it turns out the only way to check if the pharmacy got the scrip is to actually call, which means waiting on hold, and once you've done all the intermediate steps, THEN the 'renew' button works. And then add in a layer of fun if you want to get insurance involved.
Maybe other pharmacies do it differently, but I assume a nontrivial part of the process is regulatory compliance and antifraud measures.
Its one of those tasks where it could be a 2-5 minute diversion, or 90 minutes of running around, navigating phone trees and getting various ducks in a row to get the particular outcome you want/need, b/c the parties involved are not motivated to help much, are concerned about fraud/deception, and are not in good communication with each other.
So as the one person properly motivated to complete the task, who isn't worried about fraud, and can act as the intermediary between the parties, I'm now shouldering the organization burden. It is what it is, but I'd sure love to throw AI at the task.
I'm one of those "won't go to the doctor unless a limb falls off" guys, so I was in my 30s before I realized that doctor prescriptions are sent to a specific pharmacy, and you cannot buy the prescribed medicine from any other pharmacy. If you want to buy your prescribed medication from a different pharmacy, you have to talk to the doctor (or, more likely, the nurse that is being supervised by a doctor) and ask them to send the prescription to a new pharmacy. What the actual fuck?!
It's shit like this that convinces me to stick with OTC pills until the day I die.
In Mexico I filled prescriptions by taking the slip of paper to a farmacia of my choosing. Just walk in and get it. Such a better system.
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In ye old days we gave you a physical prescription that you could take with you, show up the pharmacy and shout "gib dis" and if they said "no have" you could take the same piece of paper to another place.
Now we mostly use electronic medical records and we ask you what your pharmacy is and send the information directly to that pharmacy.
Why do we do it that way? Likely things like "regulatory burden" and "let's not accidentally D-DOS the pharmacies with all of these requests."
Now I personally prefer paper script pads for some types of things and ask for them myself, but if your doctor does not allow that it likely it is because whoever owns them (large hospital system or PE firm) does not permit them. We don't complain too much because handwriting a prescription is a pain the ass and our handwriting is more ass.
I don't care if the prescription is printed rather than handwritten. Or if it's in a national database instead of being a physical document. I just don't want it to be sent to a single pharmacy; that's fucking ridiculous.
Even better, no medications should require a prescription. Let it all be OTC. Then the prescription can simply be information about what your doctor recommends.
Again, the ability to walk around with a general prescription that can be used at any pharmacy is the default state - in essence it has been removed by regulatory burden and corporate oversight.
No reason it can't come back other than those things (and plenty of doctors are still able to prescribe via paper).
Take it up with the government.
Expanded OTC formularies are something that can be done in different cultural milieus but is simply incompatible with America. Too many people would kill or harm themselves or others. The costs and externalities are too high.
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It is trained on the corpus of human text, most of which pertains to artificial problems rather than real problems. So AI should be better at the administrative-state stuff than the real stuff.
That isn't quite what I meant. Sure I believe an LLM-based agent may be able to accomplish that task. But if the intention were to make the task automatable, then you wouldn't need one. Since the point is to make the task not automatable, this is just a step in an arms race of making the task more frustrating.
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