I am VERY KEEN on the trend I keep hearing about, where various offices will have more and more online services available until we will all be able to make appointments online and so forth. That will be GREAT.
I am less keen on the steps our dentist and allergist have taken toward this goal: they’ve set up “online patient portals,” and now all their emails to us (appointment reminders and so forth) are posted online, and we get an email TELLING US that we have a new email online in our secure mailbox. So then I have to click through to the patient portal; then I have to remember my user name and password and sometimes the answer to a security question; then I have to click over to my inbox—and I open an email sent to all the patients, with the subject “Happy spring!” and then a general message about spring allergy season being here and how all patients should remember to request refills on allergy medication if needed. THIS IS NOT TOP-SECRET INFORMATION. THIS CAN SAFELY BE SENT THROUGH NON-PASSWORD-PROTECTED CHANNELS. WE ARE NOT EVEN PRESCRIBED ANY ALLERGY MEDICATION.
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I’ve noticed as I sign my kids up for summer programs that all of the programs have liability waivers: by signing on the line, I promise I will not hold the program or its employees liable for ANYTHING. ANYTHING AT ALL. Including, I see, any claims of negligence, even if they ARE negligent and it results in injury/death. With incredulity I see that the final item I agree to on this particular form is to PERSONALLY DEFEND THE ORGANIZATION (including compensating them for any damage or expense) if anyone ELSE tries to sue them on behalf of my child. Oh, yes, I can completely see myself standing up in court like Atticus Finch, delivering a scathing defense of the organization that hurt my child. That will definitely happen, and also I will write a check for the court fees on my way out, plus a few hundred thousand extra for their loss of reputation and hurt feelings. You can count on me, Youth Tennis Lesson Program.
I’d be surprised if that kind of liability was something I could in fact sign away. Like, you can ASK people to sign ANYTHING, and you can hope it’s enough to deter lawsuits, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually legally enforceable. I remember reading a long time ago that, for example, if a woman asks a guy-friend for a sperm donation and offers to sign away all her rights to his paternal responsibility, that’s not actually something she can sign away unless it goes through certain official channels; she can’t just write it up herself and sign her name. Still, I feel a little stupid every time I sign. “Sure, hurt my child on purpose! I agree my hands are tied and that nothing is ever your fault!”
I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play on on TV.
But, for my own personal mental health, I have come up with a theory about those signing away my right to sue you things. I think I might be signing away my right to take them to civil court. If they are actually negligent and my child gets injured? That’s a criminal case. I don’t think I can sign that away.
The youth tennis lesson program seems to have very high expectations of you. Good grief.
Yeah. There are two kinds of negligence, actually — ordinary negligence and gross negligence — and the kind where they’ve done something egregiously stupid isn’t covered by these liability waivers. It varies a bit by state, but in general, the argument is that after someone’s harmed, a jury might look back and say, “well, of COURSE it’s super-dangerous for tennis clubs to give six-year olds rackets and tell them to swing them, ANYONE could see that a player could get knocked into that looming net pole and suffer a traumatic brain injury,” when in fact, well, that’s an awful, tragic accident but not gross negligence. So the difference exists to counter this. I think the fancy term is hindsight bias. I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer, I only googled like mad the first time I had to sign one of those stupid things.
There are actually separate laws for horse riding, which is considered so especially likely to lead to injury that most states have special provisions to the effect of, “yes, you let your child ride that horse, so no, there will be no legal recourse if your child falls and dies, YES WE MEAN IT.” That form gave me heart palpitations.
I will be interested to see what the attorneys that comment here say but I am pretty certain those waivers are worthless for actual negligence, if I remember right from my business law classes in college.
I agree with Jody, and I told my husband the same. However, he refused to send S to camp at the local zoo because of those forms. Maybe next year.
The enforceability of waivers varies significantly from state to state, but many jurisdictions void the waiver if there is gross negligence (or worse, like recklessness, etc.), and some void them depending on the type of activity or the context. You can Google “enforceability of waivers of liability in [your state]” and find out what applies — there are a lot of non-legalese articles out there about this topic because it’s so common.
The part requiring you to defend the organization is something I’ve never heard of! (And who other than you would sue on behalf of your child? Like a class action? Or maybe an insurance company? Weird.) That is absolutely RIDICULOUS. It’s SO completely bizarre that I wonder if your state has some weird law that supports such a thing. Otherwise, the people who wrote that form are just out of their heads. I have seen non-disparagement clauses, but this really takes the cake. I wonder what they would do if you just scratched out that line in the form. I have often been tempted to do that when faced with absurd language in a supposed contract, but I’ve never actually done it.
By the way, these comments should not be taken as legal advice, etc., etc. Consult your own counsel and so forth. :)
I’ve also never heard of a form requiring you to defend the company. I . . . just don’t see that holding up. There is one particular place my son keeps going to at birthday parties and their standard waiver asks me to waive liability for a whole host of things including death. I must admit that every time he goes there I cross out the word “death” and no one has ever said a single thing about it probably because we all suspect the waiver is unenforceable for the kind of conduct that would seem likely to lead to death.
(no legal advice intended here etc)
My husband is a lawyer, and from what I recall he says those forms are fairly worthless – you cannot agree to sign away your actual rights, especially not without a much lengthier legal document / process. I consider those more of an “fyi, people are not infallible and it’s probably likely that someone, somewhere along the line, will get hurt/hurt themselves, so like.. be cool yo.” So that they’re not getting sued every time a counselor fails to tie a kid’s shoe, and they then trip and faceplant and knock their front teeth out. But if, say, a counselor suggested kids try and tightrope walk along the top of the tennis court net, and a kid fell and knocked their front teeth out requiring expensive dental surgery? More actionable. The part about DEFENDING the camp in the case of another parent suing is hilarious, to the point where I wonder how they even got that line on the final draft of the document.
I hate those patient portal things. I saw a doc for myself and my daughter and we have to have separate portals. Ahhhh.
Ooh! I have so many things to say about the secure online email portal! I work for a health care company, and I often write emails that are sent to the masses. I recently wrote an allergy email to be sent to people who may or may not have allergies (versus when we send targeted, secure emails to people we know have health conditions based on their medical claims data). ANYWAY, our legal department told me that we either have to send the email via secure channels or remove all instances of the word “you” and “your.” As you might imagine, this is extremely difficult (and also stupid). Their “reasoning” was that we cannot imply we know someone has allergies (even though we have no idea if they do or not). HIPAA is taken very seriously around here, which is good, but sometimes results in knee-jerk reactions. My guess is that somewhere, sometime, someone complained about receiving a letter indicating they had a condition and were offended. Or something like that. So if we have a client who wants us to be more personal, we have to send the email secure. Most of the time the client wants something easy and cheap, so we send a regular email (but one that is super impersonal and general and generally drives me insane to write).
TL;DR: I am often forbidden from using the words “you” and “your” in emails where we’re trying to connect with the reader.
Not legal advice, etc. etc…
I think the defend and indemnify language on the form is designed to protect the organization if your health insurance turns around and sues them to recoup expenses for any medical treatment provided to your child as a result of the organization’s negligence (which your insurance company likely has the right to do per contract, even if you yourself don’t sue). Though as covered by Lawyerish above, these sorts of form waivers aren’t necessarily enforceable in all situations (depending on your state, what actually happened, etc.)
I see others have already covered the gross negligence angle. Carry on then.
My patient portal has preferences that allow me to turn off notifications for everything but appointment reminders and test results.
I don’t think I’ve signed anything too crazy that I can recall, but who knows since I so rarely read them closely (shame on me I guess). BUT, what always cracks me up is the various parts where I have to individually sign different things that I will allow them to do with/for my child:
“You agree to allow the staff to administer Tylenol” – ok check
“You agree to allow the staff to call an ambulance in the event of an emergency” – ok absolutely
“You agree to allow the staff to administer sunscreen to your child” – yes, please
“You agree to allow the staff to transport your child to and from all camp sanctioned field trips” – sure, seem necessary
“You agree to allow your child to wade in the creek” – I was dying to say ABSOLUTELY NOT, IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS CAN THAT BOY GET HIS ANKLES WET.
I agree the online portals are a step in the right direction, and it is nice to have access to all the health records/test results so you can easily print them and bring to an appt. if necessary. However, in my experience very few providers actually use the email function of the portal, which is, in my view, the BEST part, potentially. If you have a quick simple question, it is so much easier to just email the doctor/nurse, instead of playing phone tag and/or having potentially awkward conversations in front of co-workers, OR having a pointless, unnecessary appointment. I really wish more doctors used email. It’s 2014, and they can do so many cutting-edge medical things, but somehow patient communication is stuck in the 80s.
Right, count me among those with no legal expertise who nonetheless believe that those waivers are useless. I think it is true that there can be general statutes (and possibly waivers) saying that if something no more dangerous than a normal knowledgeable person would expect to have happen, happens, well, tough luck — so (as I understand it) if, e.g., you give someone permission to put your kid on a horse and the horse bolts/bucks, well, gee sorry, but these things happen (but I suspect even then that if one could prove that e.g. the horse was known not to be broke, or whatever, and that no sensible person would have put a kid on an unbroke horse, then one could bring a suit with a reasonable chance of it getting somewhere).
But — yeah. I think the main “value” of those things is that organizations hope some parents will actually think they’ve signed their rights away and not try to sue.
All that said, I probably shouldn’t give away this secret on the internet, but as they typically ask for only one parent’s signature — I always make my husband sign. Because if our kid got hurt? You would definitely much rather he try to sue you than me. So on the off chance anyone is signing anything away, well, better him than me. I guess if our son ever lands at your tennis camp and sustains a (stupid, should-have-been-prevented) injury, my DH will have to defend the camp against me.
HA i’m totally making my hubs sign these going forward, genius!
YES about the patient portals and the clicking through, signing on, password protected crap.
I am a huge fan of the text message to confirm an appointment. All I do is type back “YES” to confirm it. Easy, accessible reminder :)
Call me a cynic, but in reference to Shauna’s comment: doctors don’t use email to communicate medical advice or answer simple questions bc they’re not incentivized to do so. Why do that when they can bill your insurance company for a visit and charge you a co-pay?
I agree that medical questions might not get answered via email, but making and confirming appointments should absolutely be able to be done that way. When I was pregnant and it wasn’t common knowledge in the office yet, I got ahold of my midwife centre’s email and tried to use it to schedule appointments and was told quite sharply that I had to phone to schedule appointments and that it was too much work for the admin staff to use email. I thought that was silly as looking at the schedule and writing a response with a time and day at their convenience shouldn’t be more difficult than dropping everything to look at the schedule and tell me a time and day when I phoned.
I didn’t have a choice though and had to continue to sneak out of my open office environment to phone each time. And if they called me I had to tell them I’d call them back from somewhere else each time and that made everything inconvenient from my side as well as their side. It also didn’t look weird or suspicious at all to my cube-mates, no of course not.
Several of my doctors release lab results and notations to start prescription X due to lab result Y via email.
We had a hot air balloon ride scheduled (was cancelled due to weather) but the firms we had to sign also stated that they would not be held legally responsibly in the event of: …,,,, (fill in blanks, anything and everything) including negligence. I couldn’t believe it. If the operator of the balloon was negligent in any way and we were injured or killed then we waive our rights to seek legal action??? Crazy.
It is actually part of my position at work to manage our patient portal. There is a big government incentive program right now, one piece of which requires us to “engage” our patients via a portal. 50% of the patients have to have access to it, 5% have to view, download, or transmit the info available on the portal. If they don’t make it so you have to log in to get your message, then there’s nothing driving you to actually log into the portal, and they hope you’ll stumble into something that will make you part of the 5% while you’re there.
Believe me, it’s just as dumb to us as it is to you. And on mine, you can ask us questions and get a timely answer, make appointments, and fill out your forms online prior to your appointment. I’m TRYING to make it less of a PITA.