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Addressing the Conundrum of Cell Number Availability in Radiology
How does one reconcile being reachable by fellow clinicians and an inevitable invasion of privacy?
I was a reluctant late adopter when it came to cellphones. The things started seeing widespread use while I was in residency training and obligated to wear pagers. The last thing I wanted was to be leashed by another gizmo. At least with a pager, it was understood that you might not be able to immediately respond. You had to get to a phone. With a cell, there was no excuse for delay. Your time was no longer your own.
After caving in, I saw another downside of getting the cell. People would call you on it, no matter how nicely or insistently you told them not to. Your only real defense was not to share the cell number with anybody, and by the time you realized this, you had already given it out to everyone. Verizon drove me batty with “how are we doing” customer service calls during a vacation I was trying to enjoy. I eventually told Verizon that one more call would convince me to switch away from the company and was happy to follow through on my threat.
Even that is no longer an option. At some point, it became a requirement for things like employment or booking travel to provide a cellphone number. (Try to sneakily give your landline and next thing you knew, they were sending confirmation texts that you couldn’t receive.) I am not even going to delve into the widespread phenomenon of private cell numbers being bought, sold, and stolen by a gazillion busybodies and nogoodniks.
In most health care positions, it makes sense to require a cell number. Late in my residency, the ER folks got equipped so we could get ahold of them immediately rather than calling desk clerks and getting put on hold while they tracked down the docs. Pretty much any rad could tell you how much better it would be if we had reliable contact info for referrers, rather than having to call their offices with critical results and winding up with dead-end touchtone mazes.
Those referrers, however, are surely as wary of giving out their cell numbers as anybody else. In addition to the aforementioned reasons, I have found the numbers to be “sticky.” Once you have given out your number, nothing you do ever seems to overwrite it.
Multiple health-care organizations have demonstrated this to my (dis)satisfaction, especially after I moved to my current house. The cell tower that provides signal to the area is suboptimal. The story why is an excellent demo of human shortsightedness and inept bureaucracy, but not worth going into here.
The net effect was that calls to my cell could go straight to voicemail without my ever knowing about them. Without so much as a “missed call” alert, I would suddenly get informed the next week that there was a voice mail. This happened despite a small collection of “signal boosters” and other gadgets that promised better function. Plus, even successfully connected cell calls in my house had patchy clarity and a tendency to drop.
None of that screamed “Use me for reliable provision of patient care” so I reached out to my then telerad employer and noted it should use my landline, which my employer had on file, and to advise all of its client facilities likewise. It was a simple ask and my employer unhesitatingly agreed.
Unfortunately, the stickiness of the cell number could never be overcome. No matter how many different people in the telerad company and their referrer outfits I told, they would still call the cell. Like a virus, the “don’t use this” number propagated endlessly in peoples’ databases, printed lists hung on walls of nursing stations, personal contact files, and God knows what else.
When I moved on to other jobs, I thought for sure I could nip the problem in the bud by not giving my cell number to begin with. I would tell them about my previous experience, and that the cell was unreliable, and not to be used. Instead, working from home, I would always have my landline handy. Sometimes they would agree, but sooner or later, someone would insist that he or she needed a cell “just for the record.” I don’t think I need to tell you how that played out.
Folks a little less careful (or neurotic) than I wind up in the same situation for opposite reasons. They don’t bother to provide updated contact info, or they have more than one cell, office, etc. If you are trying to reach them, they could luckily be at the number you have listed but otherwise there is no recourse.
It sometimes feels like a “shell game” being conducted in a carnival sideshow. Maybe the number you have got (or someone has listed for you) will be a winner today. Maybe it won’t.
Some day in the future, I expect we will completely ditch the old method of a string of digits to contact someone, and folks will look back on us the same way we do at folks who managed to survive without telephones at all.
In the meantime, I have wondered why health care (and other) organizations can’t have a simple, centralized, one-stop shop for contact information. Make it a place where one has to log in for access, and everyone is listed alphabetically, perhaps with search functions for departments and the like. People can list numbers, email addresses, and instant message apps, and update as frequently as they like without having to go through third parties.
At that point, if anybody can’t be reached, it is no longer the system’s fault. It is just a matter of someone learning to use the database better (as a contactor or a contactee).
Suppose, for instance, I am about to head out of my house, and my landline won’t be an option. Now I can quickly log in, and list my cell as the best option, maybe with a note that I won’t have access to my workstation to view cases and reports. Alternately, one may use a can’t-be-interrupted meeting message or an hour. I can post a note that all calls will go directly to voicemail, but if you use my email or one of the instant message apps, I might have a chance to shoot a quick reply.
The Reading Room: Artificial Intelligence: What RSNA 2020 Offered, and What 2021 Could Bring
December 5th 2020Nina Kottler, M.D., chief medical officer of AI at Radiology Partners, discusses, during RSNA 2020, what new developments the annual meeting provided about these technologies, sessions to access, and what to expect in the coming year.
