I Say Again – The Bots are Evil

At my job – every patient file has a section called Journal. Every time you add or delete a therapy visit, send an email through that file or make any alterations – it is automatically entered into the Journal. That way anytime you want to see what activity has been made on a file – including who did it – you can look at the Journal.

A while back I caught the bots altering dates in a Journal. At that time I had a screen shot of the journal that proved it and I alerted my boss to the situation. As far as I know – nothing really happened about it.

Yesterday, without going into too many details and boring you all, I had a similar thing happen again. I caught another mistake made by a bot that I found by reading the Journal. I had a fax that I needed to save to a particular visit – but because of the bot-error – I had to email a different department to have them make some edits. I didn't know how long it would take them to make the changes so I saved my fax to the Journal as “duplicate eval” so I could copy it later and reapply it and went on to other things.

I got an email from the other department saying they had made the edits but when I went back into the Journal my duplicate eval entry was gone. In it's place, was a bot entry called duplicate eval with a different date (the wrong one) and the time it was supposedly entered was at 3am in the morning. So my entry was completely erased – any evidence that I had worked that file was gone – and in it's place was a totally false bot entry.

I was shocked. I could not believe it. I couldn't even tell anyone what happened. I had no proof. The original document was gone and the Journal entry I had made with a copy of the document was gone and there was literally no data trail in the Journal that I had ever been in the file. So without any proof, who would believe that the bot radically altered the Journal? No one – that is who.

I realized that in the future that is how they are going to take down people's bank accounts. They will just erase all evidence that you ever had an account and tell you that you never had an account with that bank – especially if you are in a position where you can't actually go to a bank branch. Thank God, I get paper bank statements.

From now on I will have to take screen shots of all Journal entries I make that has any bot activity in it. It is truly unbelievable.

Anyway – no blog post tomorrow – see you on Sunday!

P.S. Cederq – I've been trying to get a hold of you. If you read this, please leave a comment so I know you are ok. Thanks!