I’m not complaining. I am able to offer a higher level of service because I subsidize my income from seeing patients with income from reading sleep studies. I was just trying to explain to readers of this blog why they can’t expect a higher level of service from their primary care doc (unless they are willing to be seen in a cash only practice, as you suggest).

So quit signing up with them. Market your services to the public and tell them they can get increased attention and better care out of pocket at a certain rate.

your doctor emails or telephones an rx for an antibiotic into the pharmacy upon request?

i’m amazed he/she doesn’t make you come into the office, to make a judgment that actually NEED an antibiotic.

is this something you think the secretary should do?

Because it is against medicare regulations and the regulations of most insurance companies to charge extra for this level of service.

So why don’t you guys give us the opportunity to do so?

So…I tell the “nurse” what the Rx should be and she then phones the order into Walgreens. Only problem…is that the med is the WRONG one. So…I have to call back to the “nurse” about the WRONG med and why it’s WRONG.

Finally 8 hours later, I pick up my med(antibiotic) at Walgreens.

Then, the next time I needed this specific med, I called after hours to the MD on-call, who
e-mailed the Rx to Walgreens and which I then picked up 30 min later.

I use “us” in the medical and pharmacy fields. “Can you call me when my doctor calls in that prescription?” No, because I have no way of making a note of that, and I have a million other things that are actually important that need my attention.

You can call us if you really want something — it isn’t my responsibility to babysit you. Take some responsibility for your own care. You think you’re a beautiful and unique snowflake, but you’re not. You’re one of hundreds of people that come through the doors.

90 seconds of time x 40 phonecalls per day = 1 hour a day — assuming you could be perfectly efficient with each call, which of course you can’t. But even if you could, That’s 365 hours a year (medicine is a 7×365 job), more than nine, traditional 40 hour work weeks.

Two months of lost productivity, for free. Piss that into the wind every year for free? Give me a break. In my other (non-medical) business, we measure time saved in the minutes per week. Not hours per day.

If you want generous helpings of attention doled out to you without having to fight for it, perhaps you should pay up for a concierge doc. The laws of physics pertain to the medical world, too. We don’t have 25-hour days while everyone else gets 24.

The emergency that backed everyone up. You certainly wouldn’t expect your doctor to come running to your assistance with so many people waiting to be seen.

Would you?