| rev:text
| - Worst medical care possible, imo. Actually, I still haven't received any actual medical care, so I could be wrong, I guess.
It's been over 3 weeks since my initial visit to the adult medicine office, 7 calls to the urologist office to try to schedule my referral appointment, 8 calls to the adult medicine office to try to have them correct deficiencies in the referral, 2 physical visits to the lab, 3 physical visits to the radiology office, and I still don't have an appointment with a urologist. The inefficiencies throughout this process has been unbelievable to me. How does anyone ever receive actual medical care from these guys?
Some specific details about what I went through are below, but the motivation for my review is summarized above -- 100% inefficiency. I had to prompt everyone every step of the way.
-----
I had my initial visit because I had blood in my urine. I'm pretty sure the doc asked me only two questions. (1) If it was ok for him to refer me to a specialist, and (2) what my favorite (my ethnicity) restaurant was. Seriously. Zero diagnostic questions.
OK. I guess since he's referring me to a specialist anyway, maybe it saves everyone's time to not bother asking any relevant questions. Still, it seemed weird to me that the doctor was asking me, the patient, if it was ok to refer me to specialist. I guess maybe some people don't want the potentially extra expense? Anyway, since I didn't understand why he asked me that question, I asked if blood in my urine is something I should be worried about. He told me physicians usually take blood in the urine seriously. So, I told him yes, please refer me.
He then ordered blood and urine tests, a CT scan and x-rays. He told me the lab will probably want me to fast before the blood test, so I may have to come back another day to do that. When I went downstairs to the lab, they asked me if I wanted to do the blood test now. When I told them the doc said I may have to fast, they said, he didn't put that in the order. Then it occurred to me, yeah, shouldn't the doctor specify whether or not it was important to fast, not left it up to the lab? That was my first clue that this was not going to be a good experience.
As it turned out, the lab neglected to do one of the urine tests the urologist required for me to be seen. I don't know whether that was a failure by the lab or by my doctor, but that added a good week (and a number of phone calls) to the whole referral process.
The radiology office gave me a CD with the images they took for me to bring to the urologist. Unfortunately (surprisingly), when I spoke with the urologist office, they told me they are not able to read the discs generated by SMA, and I would have to go back to the radiologist to get the physical films (a bit strange to me, since I'm able to view the images on my laptop, but whatever).
When I called the radiology office to see about getting physical films to bring to the urologist, they told me it wouldn't be a problem to pick them up, but they couldn't print them in advance, because the film cost so much. After convincing the staff at the radiologist office that I did actually need the physical film and sitting in their waiting room for nearly an hour, the tech suggested I come back the next day, because they had started printing the wrong job, and my print outs hadn't even started, yet!
The latest set of calls I had to make was to prompt the doc to attach the test results from last week to the referral.
I will try for the 8th time tomorrow to schedule my referral appointment. If this is how they handle something that should be taken "seriously," I'd hate to see how they handle something routine.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)