Can I Book Appointments for Someone Else?
Usually yes, but only once the office has authorization on file naming you. Scheduling itself is often treated as low-risk and some practices will book a time without much question — but anything beyond booking, including why the visit is needed or what the doctor said afterward, requires you to be authorized. The fastest fix is a signed HIPAA authorization at each provider, done in one pass rather than one refusal at a time. The bigger upgrade is portal proxy access, which gives you your own login and lets you book, message, and see results without a phone call at all. A health care power of attorney makes you a personal representative with broader authority. And if the person can still participate, the simplest route is often having them present to say they consent — a thirty-second conversation that unblocks the whole call.
Why won’t they talk to me?
Because nothing on file says they can, and the person refusing is following the rule correctly.
It is worth absorbing that this is not personal and not negotiable at the front desk. The staff member has no way to distinguish you from anyone else claiming to be a concerned relative, and the same rule that is frustrating you today is the one keeping your parent’s information away from people who should not have it.
So treat it as a documentation gap rather than an obstruction. The legal framework underneath it — authorizations, personal representatives, and what each one actually permits — is in getting records for an elderly parent.
What’s the fastest way to fix it?
One authorization pass across every provider, done at routine visits rather than in a crisis.
List every provider, plus the pharmacy, plus the hospital most likely to admit them. Call each and ask exactly what they need. Some accept a signed form by email; some require it in person; some have their own version and will not accept a generic one. Then get them all signed in a single afternoon.
Check for expiry dates while you are at it. Authorizations sometimes lapse after a set period, and an expired one is functionally none at all — usually discovered at the worst moment, which is the pattern with all of this.
What is portal proxy access, and how do I get it?
A formal arrangement giving you your own login to their record — and it is the single biggest upgrade available.
Depending on the system it is called proxy, delegate, or caregiver access. It usually requires the patient to authorize it and sometimes an identity-verification step. What it unlocks is substantial: booking appointments directly, messaging the practice, seeing results, requesting refills — and it removes almost all of the phone calls, which is where most of the friction in caregiving actually lives.
Do not share their login instead. It violates the terms of use of essentially every portal, and more importantly it makes every action untraceable — the audit trail shows the patient did it, which removes the record that protects you if a decision is ever questioned. Proxy access exists precisely so that helping does not require pretending to be someone else. Ask for it by name.
What if they can’t consent anymore?
Then it rests on the legal authority that already exists, or on establishing one.
A health care power of attorney that activates on incapacity is the good outcome, and offices will typically want the executed document, your identification, and evidence of activation if it is a springing one. Without any such document the route is guardianship through a court, which is slow and expensive and appropriately hard.
That territory is covered properly in getting records for an elderly parent and am I legally my parent’s caregiver — there is no point restating it here.
What can I do without any authorization?
More than you would think — you can give information even when you cannot receive it.
This asymmetry is genuinely useful and almost nobody mentions it. Privacy rules restrict what a practice may disclose to you. They do not stop you telling a practice something. So on the day you get refused, you can still report a fall, describe a symptom you have observed, flag that a medication seems to be causing a problem, or ask that the clinician call the patient back.
You will not get an answer, and the clinician will have the information. On a bad day when nothing else is possible, that is not nothing.
What should I set up now?
A short checklist, completed once, that ends the problem.
Authorization on file at every provider and at the pharmacy. Portal proxy access wherever it is offered. A health care power of attorney, if one exists — and knowledge of where it is. The provider list itself, which is the thing you will be working from for all of the above.
It is an afternoon of dull phone calls and it converts an ongoing weekly frustration into a solved problem. The wider version of this list is in what belongs on a caregiver checklist, and keeping track of who is authorized where is part of what care team in Organized.health is for.
Organized.health helps you organize your health information. It does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and nothing here is legal advice.
Related: Can I get records for my elderly parent? · What should be on a caregiver checklist? · Appointment calls in Organized.health
