Robert W.

Many doctors and other healthcare providers in the Tallahassee, Fl area have contracted with PayMyDoctor.com for billing... including mine. However, I've gone for several months getting bills, but when I go to the site to pay them, there is no record.

Today, several people at my provider and I finally determined that I, the patient, had to link the provider group to my "account" manually. I could not just enter my provider and pick the appropriate one from a list. I had to glean exact ID numbers from the middle of text on the paper bill. This is FAR from apparent from the sparse instructions on the site. I'm a retired programmer, DBA and website developer. To say that PayMyDoctor.com is grossly deficient would be an understatement.

Upon clicking the link the add a provider, nothing happened. After several attempts, I finally got a message from my browser that it was blocking popups. (Popups are often used maliciously and by unethical advertisers so blocking them improves security.) The page for linking a provider is a full page, not a small dialog box. But the developer chose to implement it as a popup. Bad Design! No reason to do that and it breaks the site for many users.

A great deal of the confusion is also caused by the site not distinguishing between the patient "account" and the provider's "account". I thought the link button "Link an account" was to link to MY ACCOUNT on some other site. It is actually to Add a Provider. With the help of someone at my provider (who actually claimed to know very little about the site) we were able to pick out the proper "ClientID" (actually the PROVIDER ID.), "Account Number" (actually MY PATIENT ACCOUNT NUMBER), "Zip Code" (we guessed that it was mine and not the provider's and it worked so either we were right or it is not verified), and "Bill Pay ID". These are obviously the Primary Keys in their relational database system underlying the site, but they should never have to be entered explicitly.

Healthcare providers as well as patients are not getting what is being paid for from this site.