The Mandelbear's Musings

\begin{rant}

If you look at Done Since 2024-01-21 and scroll down to Friday (or search for "0126Fr"), you'll find an uncharacteristically-long log item that starts out "contact liberatormedical.com Customer Service"... followed by a series of '->' items. When you see this sort of thing, it's often a sign that Someone (or more likely some company) is WRONG on the Internet.

This has gotten long, so I'm putting it under a cut tag. Still with me?

In this case, the company I was dealing with was Liberator Medical, a mail-order supplier of urinary catheters, and ostomy and incontinence supplies. They're the company my urologist -- or rather my urological oncologist -- set me up with to supply catheters, because my urethra was blocked by my enlarged prostate. Was blocked, because that was set up before I started treatment. (There may be another rant in there somewhere; we'll see.)

Well, actually they said they were setting me up with "BardCare" -- Bard being a well-known brand of medical supplies. (Don't expect to see anything about them if you just type "bard" into a search engine -- that's also the name of Google's AI "assistant". Cue a whole new set of rants, but I'll save that for another post. Maybe.) If you type "bard.com" into your browser's URL bar, it redirects you to BD.com. But that's not what I did first -- I quite reasonably typed in "https://bardcare.com/", and Firefox simply sat there glaring at me. Eventually the connection timed out. Hmmmmm. So I tried just "bardcare.com". Firefox helpfully supplied a "http://" prefix, and sent me to the aforementioned Liberator Medical. Oooooooooookay then. Let's try just "bardcare". Looking through the list of search results on DDG, the first one URL that actually includes "bardcare" turns out to be bardcare.uk".

By this time I'd already received a call from "BardCare" to verify my address and send me some samples. The caller introduced herself as "your specialist". Calling back, I rarely got the same person twice. But they all could find my account, so ok. They told me I'd have to wait for my first regular shipment to set up the patient portal. The paperwork said to go to "bardcare.com" and click "Reorder Online", then click "register".

Perhaps you can see where this is going. When I finally did that, I got to a web page with a URL of "https://hmepatienthub.com/LMS/login. Iiiiiiiiiinteresting. The banner image proclaimed it to be "Liberator Patient Hub". The page title was "Patient Hub". I appeared to be in a maze of twisty little URLs, all different. So I started to sign up.

After asking me for my email address, which would become my username (typical), my real name, and my birthday, it moved on to asking for a password. I entered something cute (Blake's 7 fans can probably get the general idea), then clicked on the "verify password" field and Firefox promptly offered to create a secure password for me. So obviously the field names were swapped. I took Firefox up on its offer, because it seemed like a prudent idea at that point.

It then asked me to set up two "security questions", followed by the usual collection of demographic information (which will probably get sold somewhere down stream -- how many rants are in the queue now?), and finally logged me in to the portal proper. There was a sidebar, with a line labeled "Profile", which epanded to lines labeled "Personal Information" and "Insurance". "Personal Information" -- well, for all I know that capital "I" might have been a lowercase "l" or a vertical bar -- had a line under "General Info" labeled "Email" -- and it was WRONG! Capital "S" to start with, and "istk" where it should have had "itzk". Not even one of the 15 cannonical misspellings. Had I entered it wrong? I tried to change it, but it was grayed out.

So I went back to the registration page, typed in my email address, and got back the message "That user name already exists -- log in?" or something to that effect. I logged in. With my real email address, and the password I'd saved. I found my email address under "Settings ... Notification"; it looked correct. I verified it. It worked. There was also a "change username" entry. It had my correct email address as my username. I didn't try to change it. That's when I called customer service.

Or tried to. There wasn't a phone number anywhere to be seen. So I went back to Liberator Medical's page and called them. I learned some things.

• The incorrect email address is 1. wrong, 2. copied from some earlier system, 3. apparently unchangeable. (My guess is it's a DB identifier.) Why is it called "email address?" Who knows?
• The rep said that "there have been other issues with the portal. Imagine that.
• When I asked how I could change -- or even see -- the answers to the security questions, I was told that "Liberator doesn't use those, or save them. They're used by some of BrighTree's other customers."
• I got BrighTree's customer service number.

I'm not sure at what point I discovered that the portal was actually provided by brightree.com. Their home page says "Software solutions for HME and pharmacy providers", and in smaller type, "Brightree automates every aspect of your business and enables you to deliver a world-class patient experience." World class?? Right. Not bright.

So I looked around a little more, and found some reviews. This one on Capterra.com should give you some idea of their reputation:

We were told that this software would make our jobs easier, that everything would be automatic and save work time for all employees. None of this was true and this has only made our jobs worse and put more work on all of us. Our training and implementation were a train wreck and still have yet to get the training and reports that we need. We have had to do nothing but clean up in this new system since it was implemented and we keep getting the run around from everyone who is "helping" us.

Several times I was thinking that I should call BrighTree and offer to fix their wretched system, but I decided that they couldn't pay me enough to touch it.

\end{rant}