Doctors and Facilities

Dad's family doctor had convinced me at the visit after Dad's ER visit to sign him up for a check up.  The first week in December, I took him to the doctor. It was a standard check up and the doctor drew blood to run in part for the problems he had seen over the summer in Dad's urine. 

What I didn't know at the time was that the facility's in house service had also scheduled a check up the same day and drew and ran the same blood tests. Because of results that they got back I had an interesting conversation with one of the staff members. I really like her a lot, but she is a straight shooter. She told me I might end up paying the full cost of one of the visits and tests. 

Both the doctor and the nurse wanted additional tests run so we did that as well. But it was fairly frustrating because the doctor's nurse did not want to cooperate with the staff at the facility. I had to call and leave her a message asking her to have them draw and run the tests. I told her on the phone that it took me 45 minutes from leaving my home to get Dad to their office. 

The doctor asked me to make a quarterly appointment for Dad in March which I did. At that point I knew I'd have to make some kind of decision about who the main doctor for Dad was. It was frustrating. 

I wished both facility focused medical practices and standard in office practices would be more open to cooperating. In office doctors should be prepared to work with facility medical staff in terms of tests, vaccines, etc. For these simple needs it is much easier on patient and family to leave the patient in place. But facilities need to be open to using office doctors as the primary and being aware of appointments made with those doctors. Often the patient has a long track record with a doctor and that can help in navigating health issues.