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More doctors are charging fees to respond to patient messages

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Re: More doctors are charging fees to respond to patient messages

#131

Post by Bluecobra »

bilater wrote: post #72
CharlesW wrote: post #4

Here's American health care: • I needed refills for two prescriptions that I've been taking for years. This time, for opaque reasons, I needed to talk to a doctor first. • Fine, but I couldn't accommodate an in-person check-in. I chose a "video visit" that, due to logistics, I had to do while away from home. Because they were a half-hour late, I was effectively forced to do this from the couch of a Costco floor displ…

The whole prescription business is such a grift. Doctors deliberately give you max 2 years of a prescription that you know you will need for longer (such as allergy meds, eye prescriptions) and then you have to waste your time and spend money just to renew it.

Agreed. I have been on the same generic blood pressure medication for ~15 years now. I was recently on a vacation in Mexico and surprised to see that you can just buy it off the shelf there. That being said my healthcare plan includes a free yearly checkup with my doctor so it's kind of nice to have a yearly baseline of bloodwork/labs and be able to see it my patient portal.

Re: More doctors are charging fees to respond to patient messages

#132

Post by gnicholas »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #91
gnicholas wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from TFA: > Health plans covered the full cost of about 82% of claims, according to the Peterson-KFF analysis. Patients who shared the cost paid $25 on average. I would be very curious to know if my insurance is paying for the useless messages that my doctor's office sends. I sure hope not — they are next to worthless!

Regardless of if you feel they are worthless, IMO, the people who create them should not be asked to work for free. I've never found the notes from mine to be "worthless", you may want to find a new doctor. Also, your TFA is kind of unnecessarily vulgar (You do know what the F in TFA is for?) here seeing as it doesn't change the point of my original comment. I did, however, add the word "all" incase someone took my c…

> I've never found the notes from mine to be "worthless", you may want to find a new doctor.

Thanks for the thought, but unfortunately our whole system (Stanford Health Care, FWIW) is like this. My doctor is better than my kids' doctor, and my wife's doctor. The incentives are just not there for them to engage, so mostly I get nurse messages that are useless. It appears to be a copy/paste from google (or some internal system), basically.

As for "TFA", I do know what it means and see it used here regularly [1] and without meaning anything harsh. It's not like some people say "TA" and some people say "TFA". It's just TFA. Regardless, I didn't meant to offend you or make it seem like I was demeaning you. I was just pointing out that the article addressed your complaint, and indicated that the vast majority of insurance plans don't leave the cost up to the patient. I nonetheless appreciate your feedback and will consider "TFA" more carefully in the future. If you have any equally pithy alternatives, I would welcome them!

1: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=tfa

Re: More doctors are charging fees to respond to patient messages

#133

Post by alistairSH »

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #101
FireBeyond wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in one hospital ER for a kidney stone, but they had no urology available, so they sent me via ambulance ("thankfully", as a paramedic, one of our company benefits was that if we were ever transported, they'd bill our insurance and waive any charges to us) to another hospital. Ambulance crew wheeled me into the ER bay, where a 'transport' gurney from surgery, was waiting, and I slid from one to the other, and wa…

One of our employees decided to go to a random hospital ER room for a small cut on his finger. It only required a bandage, no stitches. The ER charged us $3,300. We are still fighting them.

Fighting the ER or the employee? Sounds like it could have been handled at a PCP or urgent care or with a bandage at home? Staffing a full trauma center is expensive, it should cost a lot to use it.

Re: More doctors are charging fees to respond to patient messages

#134

Post by jajko »

codegeek wrote: post #20
CharlesW wrote: post #4

Here's American health care: • I needed refills for two prescriptions that I've been taking for years. This time, for opaque reasons, I needed to talk to a doctor first. • Fine, but I couldn't accommodate an in-person check-in. I chose a "video visit" that, due to logistics, I had to do while away from home. Because they were a half-hour late, I was effectively forced to do this from the couch of a Costco floor displ…

Talk to me when you get a $4000 bill for 2 hours in ER where the actual doc saw you for 5 mins and then the nurses did band-aid and over the counter burn ointment. This with Insurance (biggest mafia). AMerican Healthcare system baby!!

The sum is not a problem per se, the costs would be similar in many developed countries. Specialists can and do charge a lot (or hospital that employs them).

What matters is who picks up a bill (or challenges hospital and negotiates). I see little protection in US between patients and healthcare corporations, but its true I look from afar.

Re: More doctors are charging fees to respond to patient messages

#135

Post by moralestapia »

segasaturn wrote: post #103
moralestapia wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's right, though. I moved to Canada recently and caught a flu that I didn't take care of and, in turn, developed into pneumonia. It took me FIVE days to be able sit down with a doctor and get an antibiotic prescribed even thought it was more than evident I needed immediate care. I could have died if I waited another day. But was it free? ... ehrm ... yeah. In Mexico, doctors are as free market as it can get, downsi…

"Canadian healthcare wait times" are mostly a myth invented by the American healthcare lobby [1]. Canadian cities are dotted with walk-in clinics you can go to and see a doctor same day. Or worst case scenario you would go to a hospital ER. Neither of these options will cost you any money and you will get same-day treatment and care. If you made an appointment with a GP then yeah you would wait, since those visits ar…

Hey, I'm not a "myth invented by the American healthcare lobby", wtf.

I went through that ordeal ~4 months ago, me, personally, I didn't read it on a magazine or whatever.

Re: More doctors are charging fees to respond to patient messages

#137

Post by Someone1234 »

sokoloff wrote: post #99
FireBeyond wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in one hospital ER for a kidney stone, but they had no urology available, so they sent me via ambulance ("thankfully", as a paramedic, one of our company benefits was that if we were ever transported, they'd bill our insurance and waive any charges to us) to another hospital. Ambulance crew wheeled me into the ER bay, where a 'transport' gurney from surgery, was waiting, and I slid from one to the other, and wa…

> At no point did the ER staff ever talk to me. How did the determination that you needed urology, "oops, no urology available", and ambulance transport get arranged? It seems like some level of triage, routing, unable, re-routing had to have happened, right?

I think you misunderstood their story. They [rightfully] got charged for the ER at Hospital #1, but were mistakenly charged for the ER a second time at Hospital #2.

Re: More doctors are charging fees to respond to patient messages

#138

Post by BenFranklin100 »

alistairSH wrote: post #133
BenFranklin100 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of our employees decided to go to a random hospital ER room for a small cut on his finger. It only required a bandage, no stitches. The ER charged us $3,300. We are still fighting them.

Fighting the ER or the employee? Sounds like it could have been handled at a PCP or urgent care or with a bandage at home? Staffing a full trauma center is expensive, it should cost a lot to use it.

Fighting the ER. The employee screwed up and did not go to the urgent care per policy for minor cuts. Still, it’s bad optics to fight an employee.

Re: More doctors are charging fees to respond to patient messages

#139

Post by gnicholas »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #104
gnicholas wrote: post #2

Getting a doctor to respond through our digital messaging platform is practically impossible. Unless you're extremely persistent and specifically ask for the doctor's input (and send 3-4 messages back and forth with the nurse, whose responses are less relevant than a google search), it's impossible. I wonder if charging for these messages will make doctors more likely to respond. I wouldn't mind a modest copay for th…

> I wonder if charging for these messages will make doctors more likely to respond. Why would it do that? If they get money for messages sent (rather than messages sent by doctors) then some flunky can send a message and you can still be billed. Given how this sounds like a profit center, and doctors are cost centers (imagine if they needed to send more messages... now they have to pay more doctors!), I figure physic…

Interesting point. That could make for some awkward conversations if the patient thinks messages were coming from their doctor but then the director had no memory of the messages. It would also seem fraudulent to have messages signed by the doctor when it wasn’t actually sent by that doctor.

I think it’s much more likely that doctors will end up sending AI-autocompleted messages that take very little time to complete but seem like took much longer.

Re: More doctors are charging fees to respond to patient messages

#140

Post by lotsofpulp »

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #138
alistairSH wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fighting the ER or the employee? Sounds like it could have been handled at a PCP or urgent care or with a bandage at home? Staffing a full trauma center is expensive, it should cost a lot to use it.

Fighting the ER. The employee screwed up and did not go to the urgent care per policy for minor cuts. Still, it’s bad optics to fight an employee.

It’s bad optics to employ someone who doesn’t know what emergency means.
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