Tell HN: One Medical Is a Nightmare

31 points by rincebrain 20 days ago | 6 comments

I thought I'd relate an incredibly broken tech stack story, and its human consequences, to HN today.

I used to have One Medical access through work, years ago, it was perfectly fine quality care, and then I stopped using it.

I recently needed to find a replacement primary care and decided to try them again.

Unfortunately, after a few weeks of initial care transfer and appointments, my account is now in a Sisyphean nightmare state, where it thinks I have an expired membership expiring in the future (September 2026), and as a result, errors out on any attempt to update my membership status.

Attempting to contact their support has been an exercise in repeatedly being hung up on when attempting to put me on hold to escalate, and/or having their staff decide that if they repeat the instructions enough times it'll work.

You cannot make a second account, because they notice the duplicated personal data and insist on deduplicating it before providing you care, which appears to be how we got into this nightmare state in the first place.

Amazon support says they can't do anything because it's a One Medical problem, One Medical support says they can't do anything because they have no power to do anything.

Now I'm going to need to find another medical provider on extremely short notice, because I've been trying for two weeks to try and get this resolved with them and failing, and I am going to run out of some monthly medication renewals if I don't.

apothegm 20 days ago |

They were fine up until about a year ago. Amazon has finally started to put their fingerprint on this acquisition, and of course it’s at the expense of the fantastic customer experience that used to be the selling point. Instead it’s all about cutting costs at the customer’s expense while undercutting the competition to put them out of business.

I’m staying for now because the GP I’ve been seeing for years is fantastic and continuity is important to me given current medical status; we’ll see how long that lasts.

firefax 19 days ago |

I had a friend point out their patient portal didn't even use HTTPS pre-Amazon buyout. They apparently got super hostile and tried to stop refilling his prescriptions unless he saw a specialist to be evaluated for paranoid schitzophrenia.

The inventory was not done, because the psychiatrist did a simple internet search and found they were a well cited academic who was reguarly quoted by reporters on the subject of computer security.

In a city where you're surrounded by hostile foreign governments, yeeting sensitive data unencrypted into the void is extremely careless. (Especially when you factor in that many folks with clearances used DC OneMedical offices.)

I don't know why you think being acquired by Amazon would make them any better at medicine or information technology OP ;-)

rincebrain 18 days ago |

As an addendum to anyone who finds this.

After an extended back and forth and them temporarily marking my account as active so they could look around and try things, linking the accounts by logging into Amazon and One Medical in Chrome worked.

I generally use Firefox these days, but was pretty sure we had tried Firefox, Chrome, and Safari at one point previously in troubleshooting, so I don't know if some machinery on their end changed or I'm an unreliable narrator, but I thought I'd mention this in case anyone else finds it.

mikeodds 20 days ago |

Had a bizarre situation for a while where they had physical branches in Texas, could deliver care, but couldn’t take card payments for years. Medical bills could be paid but the actual subscription couldn’t be. They asked for a cheque. Support promised they wouldn’t pursue the charge until they could take card payments. Obviously they reneged (even with the above statement in writing) and sent it to collections.

brudgers 19 days ago |

I've been trying for two weeks to try and get this resolved

Welcome to US healthcare, the expensive hobby no one asked for.

Johnny_Bonk 20 days ago |

The modern day dystopian sysiphean nightmares are the worst. Sorry to hear that, hopefully it gets resolved.