Mildly Interesting

I’m in Canada and I can never trust my doctor to have any conversation with anyone, at any time longer than five minutes at a time for anything

The best tactic I’ve found if you want to get anything done for yourself or someone close to you is for you to do the legwork and make calls, contacts and literally hound people to do their job.

This is my experience in the US as well. Also nobody knows anything about anything.

Doctor A puts you on a medication, doctor B doesn't know until you tell them and then he says "he put you on that!? You shouldn't be on that, I'm taking you off it."

You go to have a surgery and say "hey guys, did you know that I'm difficult to intubate? Because I could die if you don't take that into account", they didn't know.

"Hey guys, I have reason to believe that the insurance card I was issued in the mail isn't completely correct, can anyone help me with this?", 4 different people at the company that issued the card have no idea what's going on, don't even know about the policy tied to the card in question and think you must have accidentally called the wrong company (you didn't).

"Hey guys how much is this going to cost?" it is literally impossible to say.

Do you think your health record got that black mark before you took control of your health journey, or after?

(Mine is "surgery seeking", apparently, as my old region has the mitigation history and the new region doesn't; and one surgery every 15 years seems to be too many for them!)

I have a doctor that actually cares. If I had one that didn't, I would not stop until I found one that did. It's mostly getting the insurance to cover medications that they don't. The doctor usually spends the last hour of his day doing this, for me and other patients. You have to find a local doctor outside of a major city with less client base so they DO have the time. I am in the US. My deductible is very high but the medication I take is life sustaining and I can never pay for it. I have to do this every 6mo to a year: make an appointment and hope the doctor gets their way. Once they didn't and that is why I am at my current doctor. There is not much negotiating a patient can do calling the insurance themselves. They will just look and see you don't know what you are talking about. No matter how you complain about the symptoms, your financial burden, your family, or the fact of it being life-sustaining. Best to have a medical professional advocate. I have even tried with doctor letters and emails forwarded before calling. That is why I wonder what the doctor actually says that gets through.

What you are saying is generally true. The only real oversight in ensuring things are moving forward is us ourselves as patients. It's our responsibility as patients to take charge of our health.

That being said, P2P is sadly a standard aspect of American medical practice. Essentially anyone in a direct patient contact position position has done them. In the clinic or hospital, it may be your primary clinician handling it but it doesn't necessarily have to be. It can be handled by other clinical staff or a group of nonclinical doctors also.

You dont have to worry about P2P since it will get taken care of (whether the service will be covered by insurance is another story). Instead I'd focus on keeping disconnected parts of the system abreast of your medical conditions and current list of medications. Because health information is protected there really isn't a great solution for centralizing this data yet so if you go to a clinic that's on a different EMR, they're not going to have all of the necessary information available to them.

I was the feisty little gremlin that fought with the insurance at a cancer-focused plastic surgery clinic. I got really good at stacking up all of the info in the first submission so that they couldn't drag their heels on shit that was time-sensitive.