Why do you think someone else's 'effort' should be free?
No-one's saying it takes zero literal effort. Just "Should I be billed by the practice $25-30 for an MA to get my email and say "I have forwarded your question to the provider"?", and then a subsequent $100+ for the provider's response to my question.
Why should that not be part of the intrinsic baseline officework and not a billable service?
Especially when it's a 100% artificial roadblock inserted by the practice? After all, the communication portal in MyChart is "Message My Provider", not "Message An MA To Message My Provider".
That is semantics, could be changed to "Message the office" but that isn't going to be the most clear title for the majority of people to understand what it is doing. It's the same as calling the office, 99.9% of offices (basically all outside of concierge/direct care) are going to be triaged by an MA/nurse first.
As far as the payment requirements I've heard of, I have never seen anyone bill just for the MA reply.
My comment on this was in response to a comment positing the potential for exactly this:
> How long until administration figures out that they can juice revenue by shitting up the emails to increase back-and-forth traffic?
And then, the reply I got was basically "Well, why shouldn't they be able to do that?"
Sometimes I have questions that don’t need the provider’s time, but there is no way to get ahold of anyone else in the office (the practice is part of a large hospital system and calls are answered by a call center that knows nothing)
How long until administration figures out that they can juice revenue by shitting up the emails to increase back-and-forth traffic?