Personal Assistant

For some reason unbeknownst to me, health insurance in the United States is tied to employment. So one of the joys of starting a new job is being forced to reevaluate a bunch of plans, choose new options, and in some cases, find new doctors. As it turns out, my previous physician retired last year, so in any case I need to find a new one.

This afternoon I called my preferred medical network to ask about doctors accepting new patients, and the agent informed me that due to a shortage of folks, there pretty much isn’t anyone for the next couple of months. Lovely. I asked about waiting lists or notifications I could sign up for; naturally that doesn’t exist either. The best he could suggest was to check the physician search page every couple of days.

Well, I’m lazy, so I reverse engineered the search API behind the website, wrote a Lambda function to query it periodically, and set up an alarm to email me when the search results come back non-empty. Take that, manual process.