Whether you are planning to come in for a wellness visit or discuss a new medical concern with your physician in-person or on a telehealth video conference, preparing ahead for the issues you wish to talk about may actually be helpful.
From a physician perspective, here are some key points we are grateful for:
1. You have a complete list of all your updated medications, dosages and how you're taking them. This is important because sometimes you get new prescriptions from other doctors or providers, and you might be taking it differently than how we expected you to take it. Hearing your side of the story about your medications makes all the difference when deciding our next care plan.
2. You have a list of most recent specialist(s)' names and contacts and the conditions they are managing as well as the medications they are managing.
3. Your concerns - here are the most important tips (which will differ from other media, magazine article opinions).
- Please do not wait until the end of the visit to express to us your most pressing concerns. Issues such as chest pain, for example, should be addressed first. We may need to reschedule your toe fungus concern to another day.
- Please do not "save up" your medical concerns over time and plan to address it all at one visit. This is not the best way to address your issues - some of which you may be sitting on for months and have become a much larger problem than it was when it first appeared. When you have many severe issues happening at once, your chances of landing in an emergency department is higher. Physicians also have to break up your visits into multiple office visits to stabilize your situation, and it can be a scary situation for many.
- Please choose up to 2 (two) medical concerns only. If you have a much longer list, please be prepared to make multiple visits to discuss.
- Physicians may only have 15-20 minutes to listen to your concerns and try to develop a plan for you and advise you of the risks and benefits.
- Taking the time with 1 or 2 concerns gives you both the best opportunity to focus very closely on the issues at hand instead of giving it a cursory evaluation - you have time to ask questions; we have time to answer and help you formulate a plan.
- Sometimes, while a concern is being addressed, you may find that the doctor asks you questions about other concerns or symptoms that have also been ailing you. This is often because many conditions have associated symptoms, and we will begin to tease those out while trying to investigate or get more clues.
- If you feel a symptom or issue is pertinent to the main concern being discussed, but hasn't been addressed, please make sure you speak up about this.
- Physicians would love to have much more time with each patient. However, we need to balance the time we can spend with each patient with the access or open availability to see patients for their sudden or often urgent concerns on a given clinic day. When you prepare properly for your visit, it gives us the chance to stay focused on your symptoms or medical concerns, without worrying that our schedules are going awry.
- You can help us organize your concern by outlining the following symptom story for us before coming in:
- When did the symptom or issue first occur or how long has it been happening?
- Describe any type of pain in detail (location, intensity, frequency, quality - what does it feel like?)
- Any medications or therapies you've already tried and its results
- What other symptoms seem to occur with it, like a pattern?
- Any other physicians, providers (such as Emergency Rooms, urgent care, specialists) have already evaluated this and what was their plan? How did it go?
4. Please do not be afraid to express what you are worried about. Even if it may feel like you are "over-thinking" it, it may provide a clue for a physician investigating your symptoms or allow us an opportunity to reassure and explain why you needn't be so anxious.
6. If you are planning a wellness visit or physical (which are essentially the same thing), primary care physicians who are helping you organize your health care portfolio and calendar will need:
--- Information:
- Your most recent cancer screening tests (e.g. colonoscopy, mammogram, pap smears, imaging tests, labs).
- Date of procedure/test
- Who completed the procedure/test, or where did you go to complete?
- Your updated list of immunizations or vaccinations (if you have paper or electronic records handy, this really helps!)
- Any new family history changes
- Any new medical diagnoses, surgeries that happened over the past year or since you were last seen?
--- Important note: A Wellness Visit is focused primarily on preventative care. A new problem addressed that visit that requires much additional work, new prescriptions, significant testing, procedures, or care plan counseling or creation will need to be billed and reported to the insurance company as an additional "problem visit" addressed during the Wellness visit. This may incur additional visit bills, so it is in your best interest to try to plan your visits and consider scheduling separate visits so that we can properly have the time to address your problem concern. This is another reason not to "save up" your issues to the one day that you see us that year.