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| - As parent there are few feelings worse than letting your child down. Two surgeries, countless wasted hours dealing with broken scheduling/billing/etc processes and my daughter is worse off than when we started. We started with headaches and strabismus and now we have headaches, strabismus, and misaligned eyes at certain angles.
Medical Care Quality: Uncaring/Rushed w/ a poor outcome
Overall Patient/Caretaker Experience: Poor in most ways.
A couple years ago, our daughter was having some pretty bad headaches regularly (rather disconcerting for us as we could not identify a cause). After seeing several different specialists and even having an MRI to rule out anything sinister, we landed at the Arizona Pediatric Eye Specialists practice where our daughter was diagnosed with strabismus (and the headaches were a secondary effect of her tilting/straining). The opthamologist recommended surgery and referred us to Dr. Plotnik.
Dr. Plotnik himself seems like a decent guy. His bedside manner in our visits were highly variable - between pleasant/good-with-kids and impatient/distracted. He talks over you and provides answers that suggest impatience or arrogance, but is confident and authoritative.
At the first consult, we were offput a bit by his hurried and aggressive push for surgery, but felt OK about his capabilities. So, we scheduled the surgery. On surgery day, Dr. Plotnik was great before in settling our daughter's nerves down, but rushed on the aftercare and failed to set expectations on recovery.
After the surgery, we noticed almost immediately an odd "misalignment" of her eyes when she looked at certain angles. One eye would basically go off on it's own. This was unsettling, of course. At the follow-up (a week after surgery), Dr. Plotnik seemed unconcerned and said to let it heal and let's check it again in a few months (which honestly made good sense).
Unfortunately, six months came and went, but the condition did not improve. The headaches were gone though, so we felt better in that regard, but now we had a different issue that was started to impact our daughter emotionally (kids can be cruel with things like that).
This is when we started to feel some doubts about Dr. Plotnick. As noted above, our daughter had some very significant mistracking between eyes after the first procedure. When we went to see him, he spoke and behaved as if the first one never happened. He was dismissive (politely) and wouldn't offer any discussion of why it resulted as it did other than the pure clinical cause in the current state. However, we had spoken to friends who said a second surgery was not uncommon, so we were hopeful (truthfully, we didn't care - we just wanted it fixed) and scheduled the second surgery. Stupid mistake on our part.
She had the surgery ~4 weeks ago. The results are not better - just different, and she's had headaches (milder than before) since the procedure. Our scheduled follow-up was postponed - the office called to move the appointment hours before. Then, the office calls and says they need to move it again by a week, and when we explain that we have concerns about waiting given the issues we see....
... And they say, "It's OK. The technician has looked at the chart, and she's healing OK.". WHAT? Then, she asks which eye it was?!?! OMFG. A scheduler who knows nothing about the patient is giving us an opinion about her condition based on a technician who has not seen the patient interpreting a chart that has not been updated in two weeks?!?! Seriously? I'm really questioning the legality of what was told to us here... Clearly, the scheduler just wanted us off the phone so she could move on with her list of appointments to move, but this is more than a little disturbing. After getting a slightly animated, we were handed off to someone who was empowered and interested in addressing our concerns & set us up with another doctor.
Sadly, it's typical of the experience we've had with the office. The basic processes appear to be broken. Billing (like most specialist practices) is a confusing mess w/ little transparency. Scheduling is a nightmare. It typically involves calls (w/ no expectation of timing) with zero chance of getting the person you need if you should miss their call and have to call back. Even trying to pay them (under threat of cancellation of surgery appointment w/ 4 hour notice!) was a nightmare (unanswered phones, forboding messages).
The people in the office themselves vary in demeanor. The front desk person when you come in seems great. She's patient with the lobby full of kids (knowing that folks are gonna be waiting at least 20 minutes after their appointment time). The checkout person is downright unpleasant. Our several interactions have always been same with her being impatient and seemingly not willing to be bothered when needing to do something simple like provide a contact or print something out.
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