Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has come to increasing
prominence in recent years, inserting itself into the ‘everyday’ for modern
living in such a manner that it has impoverished our imagination for a
pre-internet life. Whilst older members of the population may demonstrate some
reticence in part about getting on board with these new digital modalities, the
young have been exposed at the outset. Public services have picked up the
gauntlet for tech evangelism as we are all increasingly enjoined as digital
customers to go ‘paperless’, with regards to banking, utilities, council
services and the NHS. This is not without controversy and contestation
regarding the wider motives of digital governance and surveillance capitalism.
In theory smart app technology such as Patient Access (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_UK)
provide a valuable alternative route to accessing a range of frontline GP
health services and prescriptions and help to automate routine administrative
functions, thereby avoiding onerous telephone queues or the need for in-person
appointments.Real-world complications however wait in the wings. The Patient
Access app and desktop site (https://www.patientaccess.com/)
comes courtesy of EMIS Health which is in the vanguard of all those
controversial private company partnerships within the NHS.
As with all smart app technology there is the burden of ‘digital
literacy’ which necessitates an intermediate level of savviness for those who
are co-opted into using these routes. Periodic hardware upgrades become
mandatory, constant innovation usually means smart apps have a short shelf-life
of a few months before they are updated and patched to accommodate the latest
innovations and iron out software glitches and security issues. The Patient
Access app has been revised in recent months to incorporate new security
protocols. Online verification has been given centrality for safeguarding of
sensitive information against cybercrime. A new age of digital Darwinism
presents in an online ecology of malevolent actors, scammers and traffickers to
terrorists and hostile foreign governments. Verification protocols have
traditionally taken the form of passwords. Online access will only be
granted by following a formidable assault course that tests the fatigue and
endurance of each individual. Patient Access previously required third-party
verification protocol (in the form of a six-digit SMS text) on top of email and
password login. This was revised in recent months by prompts to move to
verification by yet another smart app! Without specifying which particular
‘authenticator’ app to use (ideally the Microsoft one), we are left to try out
a variety of apps from the online smartphone stores. Many of these apps are
problematic, packed out with lots of diverting adverts which means they are
very difficult to navigate without accidently pressing on the wrong part of the
touch screen which easily results in downloading unwanted and potentially
harmful software. Luckily for me I used the aforementioned Microsoft
authenticator app which is advert free and relatively simple to use. Not so
lucky for my Dad when we accidently downloaded the wrong app which refused to
play ball. I spent the next several hours trying to fix this with several
possible solutions including uninstalling and reinstalling each app in turn.
Needless to say, all attempts remained gloriously futile. Dad returned to his
local surgery to explain the problem wherein another staff member spent yet
another wasted hour trying to salvage said app and concluded that individual
codecs attached to this account had been inadvertently compromised,
necessitating a grand reset from the remote technicians behind the curtains of
EMIS. This saga was not satisfactorily resolved for a number of months and is
surely another testy testimony to the dystopian realities of navigating
important public services by remote technologies.
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