Maintenance medications prescribed by your doctor should last you through your next scheduled appointment. To save time, phones calls and missed dosages, remember to ask your doctor for any prescriptions while you are here in the office. If for some reason it is necessary to have your prescription refilled over the telephone, be aware that it will not be done in an hour or two. Please do not wait until you are out of medication to call the office.

This office continues our long tradition of calling patients with their test results. Every result is reviewed by a physician before a medical assistant is instructed on how to direct the patient regarding the results. You should allow up to 10 days (sometimes longer for more sophisticated tests) for the process to be fully complete. If you haven’t heard from us within 10 days, please contact the office.

Referrals may be required by your insurance company if your doctor refers you to see a specialist or have a test performed. Please be sure to request referral(s) before you leave the office. If you forget to request the referral before you leave the office, please note that we require at least 48 hours’ notice for any referral that is not an emergency. Please do not allow your referrals to expire, as they cannot be readily re-issued.

The doctors in our office usually return non-emergent phone calls at the end of their day, which can sometimes be as late as 9:00 in the evening. If you left a non-emergent message requesting that a doctor call you back, please be aware that you may not hear from them immediately and it is not necessary to repeat your call the office. As the doctors see patients straight through the entire day, they return phone calls according to priority and the volume of calls they receive. It is important that you give the receptionist as much information as possible about the reason for your call so it may be prioritized appropriately.

We receive a large volume of forms that patients need filled out for work, school, etc. These forms required much staff and physician time to complete. Please present forms at the time of your exam. The fee for any forms to be completed outside of an office exam is $1.00 per page, with a minimum charge of $15.00.

We schedule many different types of appointments, depending on the individual needs of the patient: • Complete physicals are typically booked for 45-60 minutes and are scheduled many weeks in advance • Surgical clearance appointments are best scheduled approximately 10 days prior to surgery. These visits also require 45-60 minutes and need to be scheduled as soon as the surgery date is known, even if it is a tentative date. Generally, all pre-surgical testing is done through our office which allows the physician ready access to the results. • Standard follow-up appointments are scheduled based on the medical condition. These appointments typically should be coordinated with the office based on the need for medication refills, scheduled blood work, and are timed according to the needs of fasting or non-fasting periods of the day. • We also have appointments left available for same day sick visits. The appointments are obviously less predictable and depend on the severity of the illness. When a patient needs to see a physician for such an appointment, the receptionists will do their best to properly plan the visit based on the accuracy of the description of the problem given to them and will try to best schedule when the patients can be seen in a timely manner. The wait times will be influenced by other previously scheduled appointments and the number of sick visits that need to be accommodated that day. Of course true emergencies are given the highest priority.