I Filled Out the Forms Online. Here’s a Clipboard.

Some medical offices let you fill out your forms before an appointment. You enter your address, list your medications, provide an emergency contact, and answer several questions about your health. Then you arrive and receive a clipboard.

The clipboard has forms on it.

Not entirely new forms, either. There’s your address again. Your emergency contact. Your medications. It’s as if the patient portal and the waiting room have never met.

I understand that information changes. People move. Prescriptions change. An emergency contact might decide they’d rather not be the emergency contact. A quick check makes sense. But if the office needs to know whether anything has changed, it could ask whether anything has changed. Instead, you’re writing your street address for the second time this week while sitting six feet from a computer that already has it.

The online forms were supposed to save time. That was the pitch. Complete these before your visit, and you’ll be ready when you arrive. Then you arrive and begin the paper portion of being ready.

Sometimes the clipboard also asks for your date of birth on more than one page. Fair enough. It’s a medical office. They need to make sure the pages stay together. But by page three, it starts to feel like the paperwork is checking whether you’ve remained the same age since the first page.

And there’s usually a box for your email address, which you used to create the portal account that sent you the forms you already filled out. We’ve developed a fairly elaborate system for getting information onto a screen, then asking a person to write it down again.

None of this is the fault of the person at the front desk. They didn’t spend their morning wondering how to add handwriting to an online process. They’re handing out what the system tells them to hand out. I’m sure they’d also prefer not to decipher my attempt to spell “hydrochlorothiazide” on a clipboard balanced against my knee.

Maybe the online answers don’t transfer to the office’s other system. Maybe a signature is still needed on paper. There may be a perfectly sensible explanation for each individual step. It’s the complete trip that gets strange: fill out forms at home so you won’t have to fill out forms when you get there, then fill out forms when you get there.

At least the portal can send a reminder. I’d hate to forget my clipboard appointment.