Apocryph761 OP t1_iujx8i4 wrote on October 31, 2022 at 10:02 PM

Reply to comment by yeahyeahbird in What "old-hat" technology do you think is still vastly superior? by Apocryph761

This is the way.

I spent 10 years working in Optics in the UK. The NHS will cover the cost of eye tests (and in some cases, spectacles too) if you meet certain criteria (mostly age-related, but welfare recipients get it too).

Until just before the pandemic, NHS claims were done on something called a GOS1 form. You just gave your details and the reason for the NHS entitlement, signed at the bottom, and away you go. Processing these forms through Primary Care Trust (PCT) was a doddle, too. Honestly the hardest bit was ensuring the forms were filled correctly.

Now? Now it's all digital! (:

You have to get an iPad. Log into the website that's probably down (outage is hilariously common), and slow at best. Confirm details with the patient. Click through a number of pages in doing so, waiting for the loading times. Send the form digitally to the Optometrist and hope the form actually appears on their end (it's not a given that it will, and if it doesn't then you have to do everything all over again!), have them sign at the end of the test, then shove the iPad in the patient's face again to have them sign to confirm they've had the eye test. Then the form is digitally sent to PCT for processing, where it will probably get rejected for some BS reason and the clinic doesn't get paid anyway.

They tell us this is better. This is the future.
And they wonder why people are quitting optics in large numbers.

yeahyeahbird t1_iujz337 wrote on October 31, 2022 at 10:16 PM

The amount of wasted budget is ridiculous. My boss was on a conference call about it once and the numbers were staggering. They had to get tablets for all the employees, purchase the app that closest fit what we were doing, but it wasn't really what we needed at all so we had to pay developers to adjust it and IT guys to tweak it and work with the people using it to relay information back to the people who could "improve" it and it was implemented without any kind of trial period or testing.

It set us back months and the cost was in the millions by the time it was usable, and even then, it was slower and more basic and less detailed, so nobody had enough information to be helpful at all when you had to look at it.

All this was to generate information that had to be printed and mailed out, when a box of ballpoint pens could have filled out the same paperwork.