There’s something funny going on in healthcare. Doctors are disappearing, leaving behind miffed patients, expensive prescriptions, fat bills presented to Medicare and private insurers and even an occasional copay or two, even when services are not completed.
I’ve personally run across this a few times, most recently when my new allergist disappeared like a puff of nasal spray.
It all started a few months ago when an unusually hot summer blanketed the East Coast. The heat — or something — irritated my skin and I began breaking out in painful rashes.
I went first to my internist, who shrugged and asked what kind of soap I used. “I don’t know. Soap’s soap, right?” I asked.
“Soap is not soap,” she responded briskly. “Try Ivory or something like that. See you in 12 months.”
When not actively scratching, I called the dermatologist who occasionally lectures me about sunscreen, hoping she would have the answer — or at least find it worthy of more exploration.
“Who knows? It could be anything,” she said. “Stay out of the sun.”
After another month or so of discomfort, I went looking for an allergist. I have outlived my previous allergists so I looked around and found a nearby practice that was taking new patients.
I soon found myself in shiny new offices that somehow had that private equity feeling. It’s hard to describe but you know it when it’s there. An inexperienced front-desk person took various details, getting half of them wrong, and eventually the doctor appeared.
She expressed extreme sympathy over my condition, repeatedly telling me how sorry she was. She then ordered a bundle of tests and wrote up a batch of prescriptions and sent me off to the lab.
“I’ll be in touch the second we get the lab results,” she promised.
And that, as they say, was that. No phone calls, no texts, no callbacks. I called the lab that had drained five vials of my blood. They asked me to give them a good review on Google but then went on to claim they had never heard of me. I repeatedly called the spiffy new medical offices and never got anyone on the phone, being told by various bots that my call was very important, something I already knew.
My last message to the doctor bot was that my next call would be to the insurance fraud investigators. Still waiting for a response to that.
This might all seem odd but it’s a topic that is getting increasing attention from the healthcare industry and government.
It works both ways
Now, doctors and researchers are quick to point out that this is a two-way street and that patients are just as liable — if not more so — to ghost doctors and other providers by missing appointments, failing to return calls and not taking prescriptions or adopting more healthful behaviors.
Doctors have long complained about ever-increasing workloads. Much of their current ire is aimed at patient email, which can be a huge time suck for busy clinicians trying to stay on schedule. It can also haunt them during their off-hours, putting them under more pressure and increasing the risk of burn-out.
The problem is not just anecdotal. The federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality recently published findings that patients often fail to follow through on “ordered diagnostic tests, referrals, and evolving symptoms.” Busy doctors and overloaded staffs often fail to nag patients to follow the recommended steps.
The researchers found that baseline “loop closure” rates were often below 60%, with particularly low rates for colonoscopy referrals and cardiac stress testing, not exactly the most popular procedures.
The AHRQ study found some hope of improvement. Outreach and scheduling interventions — nagging, in other words — improved completion of colonoscopy and stress-test referrals. A structured symptom-tracking registry improved timely follow-up and reduced the median time of symptom resolution from 103 days to 20 days.
Technology takes a hit
Not surprisingly, technology shoulders some of the blame. Patients and office staff are frustrated by AI bots answering calls, electronic health records that can be confusing to use and a frequent lack of effective alerts to data that should be immediately addressed.
Without more fool-proof technology, patients can too easily “disappear” between an exam and the promised next step, according to a 2025 SAFER guide. It found several frequent points of failure and suggested remedies, including:
Everybody assumes somebody else will follow up. Solution: Unambiguous responsibility; the ordering clinician retains responsibility unless another clinician explicitly accepts it.
A doctor leaves, rotates off service or is absent. Solution: Coverage arrangements and routing to a responsible substitute.
An abnormal result sits unacknowledged. Solution: Escalation to an alternate responsible clinician after a specified interval.
An outside test arrives by fax or mail. Solution: Incorporation into the record and an additional tracking process where integration is incomplete.
A notification is sent, but care does not advance. Solution: Monitoring of both acknowledgment and actual follow-up—not simply transmission of results.
While AI, patient portals and other recent technology play a part in the problem, many of the same troubling patterns also plague paper-based practices. A British Medical Journal article referred to it as “an old follow-up problem under new digital pressure” rather than “a newly invented technology problem.”
Whatever the cause, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently published guidance for hospitals that calls on healthcare organizations to:
Clarify responsibility for abnormal findings.
Reliably transmit findings to the clinician responsible for follow-up.
Monitor results sent to the wrong clinician, to a clinician who has left the service, or not received by the responsible clinician.
Give patients a list of pending test results at discharge and written instructions for obtaining them.
Provide channels for patients to report diagnostic safety concerns and a formal process to investigate and respond.
What to do
While those recommendations are aimed at healthcare providers and institutions, they also translate into advice for patients that can be easily translated as:
Pay attention. It’s not someone else’s job to remember what you’re supposed to do and keep track of whether you do it.
Ask questions. Doctors are busier than ever and under ridiculous time pressure but it’s your life: if you don’t understand something, ask.
Write stuff down. Everyone has a calendar, printed or virtual. Use it. Put your appointments on it.
Take your medicine, and record it. Use a calendar, appointment books or spreadsheet to keep a record of when you took your pills, shots, drops and walks.
Give yourself deadlines. If you’re supposed to get a stress test “soon,” put a reminder on your calendar that will help you remember to do it.
Be nice but be persistent. Things slip. Don’t take it personally but don’t give up. Doctors schedule tests, procedures and prescriptions for a reason.
Be wary of AI
Technology can be a big time-saver but, as ChatGPT and other platforms constantly remind us: “I’m AI and I can make mistakes.”
Doctors and patients alike want to spend less time filling out forms, sitting on endless hold and trying to decipher confusing emails, but whether current versions of AI are quite up to the task is in doubt.
One task fraught with peril is communicating test results and other crucial information to patients. Some doctors are using AI to translate jargon-laden data into layman’s terms but the outcome is not always up to par.
"We find that AI can sound like a doctor but not think like one," said Sarah Preum, an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth and co-corresponding author of a study recently presented at the 2026 Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and published in the conference proceedings.
“While LLMs (large language models) demonstrate capability in drafting certain thematic elements, they struggle with clinician-aligned generation in other themes, particularly question asking to elicit further information from patients,” the researchers concluded.
Is private equity a factor?
Private equity firms are buying up everything from car washes to medical practices. The promise is that they will bring management expertise and financial resources to improve service and improve productivity.
But there are credible indications that healthcare may not be beneficial for either doctors or patients. Early concerns include shorter visits, high physician turnover and even increased patient harm in some settings.
A 2026 Brown University study found that physicians at 225 acquired practices billed about 30% more while seeing about 11% more patients. The researchers couldn’t determin whether patient health was affected but said more study is needed.
Ghost-busting steps you can use
No one wants to be ghosted by anyone and certainly not by their trusted physician. While there are no sure-fire remedies, there are a few steps you can take to avoid being deserted in your time of need:
Be blunt. It’s your right as a patient to nail down the next steps that you can reasonably expect your doctor to take — when will you get your test results, what should you do while you’re waiting, who can you call if you don’t hear from the doctor.
Take notes. You can do it right in the office. Use a small pad and write down what the next steps are and when you can expect them. Be polite. Just say you want to make sure your expectations match your doctor’s.
Show up in person. It sounds obvious but there’s nothing wrong with showing up at the doctor’s office and telling the front desk that there appears to be a mistake. Chances are they will scramble to fix it then and there.
Follow through. If, like my vanishing allergist, a medical practice stands you up, complain loudly. Doctors are regulated by the state in which they practice. Use a simple Google search like “complaints about doctors in [state].” Fill out an online form to get things started.
Don’t forget the insurance. If a medical practice has billed you for service that was not rendered, it may find itself facing charges of insurance fraud. Google “health insurance fraud in [state]” to find the agency that handles this. If the disputed services was billed to Medicare, check this page. For Medicaid fraud, call 1-800-HHS-TIPS (1-800-447-8477).
Be bland. If you file a formal complaint, make it calm and factual. Don’t call people crooks or quacks, just recite what happened and include any evidence like dates of visits and summaries of conversations with your doctor.
We hope this doesn’t happen to you. If it does, it’s likely someone will straighten it out when you bring it to their attention. If not, you can at least press for an explanation a bit more exhaustive than, “I’m AI. I can make mistakes.”