Flutterby™! : An open letter to Kaiser Permanente

Hello, good folks at Kaiser!

Just following up to my whine on Twitter, I didn't expect a response, but since I've gotten two @replies I figured I owed y'all this.

In particular, I'm complaining about the recent email entitled: "11 ways to get the most from your plan". This pointed me to the PDF entitled "Kaiser Permanente Annual Notification California 2016".

Now this isn't quite as bad as some of the horror stories I heard in response to my social media griping, one woman told me of getting regular mammogram reminders despite having had a double mastectomy, and there were other tales of absurdity, but: You as an organization have *so* much information about me, when you send generic documents like this you waste my time.

Worse, when that document includes things like "2. Choose or change your primary care doctor", it makes me think "oh, crap, did my recent job change mean Kaiser lost my preferences?", and then I go have to recover my Kaiser password, log in, realize that, no, everything is fine, and, in fact, there's pretty much nothing at all in this document that applies to me.

• The majority of the offices opening are hundreds of miles from me.
• Of the ones that are close to me, I might need to know in an urgent situation, in which case I'll be checking the web site in the moment.

The entire message was completely irrelevant to me. And you have my home address, and know that I don't use a whole lot of medical services, so this 6 page PDF could have been distilled to a 3 paragraph email with the stuff that might possibly be relevant.

Which, of course, means that I'm way more likely to just delete future communications from Kaiser unread.

Now I realize that this is a hard problem. There are HIPAA issues, and frankly, it doesn't cost you anything to just let your customers take the costs of sorting out what's relevant and what isn't. However, when the next open enrollment period comes up and I think "well, do I follow my wife over to Western Advantage or stay with Kaiser", the amount of time I've spent figuring out whether I should have read that email will be taken into consideration.

Thanks for your time.