Be Part of the Solution … Join SDCMS-CMA Today!

A Sampling of What’s Got San Diego County’s Physicians Annoyed …

• Politicians who make decisions regarding medical practice without any understanding of the system, thereby forcing me to alter the way I practice in order to cover my ***.
• Putting a sign in my waiting room telling people where to complain if they don’t like me or if I don’t do what they want. Ridiculous.
• Insurance companies listing if I’m a good or bad doctor based on their crazy data collection, which is often inaccurate and doesn’t reflect the level of medical care patients deserve.
• Providing a service and then getting paid three to six months later.
• Having patients yell at my front-office staff about a $5 co-pay for the insurance that their employers pay for.
• Declining reimbursements.
• Medicare diagnosis codes for ordering tests.
• Physicians who refer to psychologists instead of psychiatrists for recommendations for psychotropic medications and psychotherapy.
• All prior authorizations for prescription medications, but especially those that take more than five minutes of physician time to complete.
• Those three-page “did you know” reports from health plans’ pharmacy benefit managers that warn of the potential dangers of medication X in patient Y. Insulting, and a major waste of time and paper.
• “Medical” marijuana requests from nonterminal patients (who insist that it works better than marinol, and usually have a well-documented history of drug abuse prior to this request).
• Patients who schedule their office appointment two days after their meds will run out, so an urgent call to the pharmacy is necessary to continue their meds.
• Pharmacies that have an automatic-refill request system to ask for a refill of the patient’s meds even though the patient may have refills written or has an appointment before the med renewal is due and has never requested a refill from the pharmacy.
• Having insurance companies decide if my recommendations are “medically necessary.”
• Having an inept system for physician complaints/concerns. The DMHC and the DOI are useless for us.
• Online physician-rating systems that lure only the disgruntled, making a new patient potentially afraid to go to a doctor.