rev:text
| - The staff members at the First Choice--Corporate Drive location are very friendly but my last visit here made me decide to switch to a new dentist. The total exam time took 20 seconds. The dentist did not even look at all of my teeth and diagnosed me with a number of cavities, I assume by looking at x-rays. The hygienist asked the dentist later to look at another tooth that she hadn't looked at and she came back and said, "Oh yeah, that one needs a crown." No full exam, no explanation. It was a tooth they did a filling in last year. The cleaning took about four minutes total. The dentist recommended a $500 out of pocket dental night guard even though I told her that the one I got from pharmacy was working fine.
I decided to pay out of pocket for a second opinion and a real cleaning at another clinic and I'm glad I did. The other dental clinic staff spent about two hours doing a full exam, including taking a full medical history, completing an oral cancer screening, checking my jaw, lymph nodes, and glands, checking my soft tissue and probing the depth of the pockets between all of my teeth and recording measurements, and letting me look at each of my teeth with a video camera. I'm sorry to say that these exams were never completed during my time at First Choice.
First Choice mailed me another patient's dental records/x-rays by mistake. When my new clinic called to get the correct x-rays, First Choice emailed them over without getting verbal permission or a written release from me which they still do not have. When the new dentist checked my insurance compared to the x-rays that were sent, it appears that First Choice billed Delta Dental for x-rays they did not do. Lastly, the new dentist made different recommendations as far as treatment.
First Choice gets an A+ for friendliness but low marks for competency, ethics, thoroughness, and following best practice guidelines.
|