Guidelines for Patients

When asking for medication refills, please let us know the drug, the dose, how you take it, and the quantity you would like. For most drugs, you can get as many pills as you wish if you pay cash yourself. Insurance may limit payment to 30 or 90 days, but insurance cannot limit the drugs you receive if you pay for them. For inexpensive drugs, it may be easier and less costly to buy 6–12 months all at once. Frequent travelers should consider just paying cash for a back-up supply to have on hand.

If the pharmacy says we did not send over a prescription but we told you we were doing so, it is most likely that we actually did send the prescription over. However, these prescriptions are typically sent electronically and they go through at least five different computer systems to reach the pharmacy. Just ignore the pharmacist, call our office while you are at the pharmacy, and let us help sort things out.

If we email you a reminder regarding your annual exam or a needed test and you do not wish to have that done, please write back and let us know. Just say, “I don’t want my annual now. Contact me again in six months,” or something like that. Otherwise, we have no way of knowing whether you received that email or not. This forces us to contact you repeatedly when you don’t wish to hear from us. It also creates extra administrative overhead which detracts from patient care.

If you are referred to a specialist and have trouble getting an appointment, please call us. This approach is preferable to having you call some other specialist on your own that we don’t know and have not referred you to. We spend a lot of effort on these referrals and work to obtain VIP access for our patients. Your response, if frustrated by a front office person elsewhere, should be to call our office to help you. If you can’t solve your problem in two phone calls, it is time to reach out to MedNorthwest. Patients sometimes discount these long-term referral relationships and what they mean for the quality of your care. It’s not wrong to see a specialist that a friend suggested, and maybe you will like this doctor better than the one we recommend, but we just want everyone to be aware that seeing a specialist outside of our regular referral patterns means that you are circumventing a system which is in place to promote better care and oversight. It’s not necessarily wrong to do so, but you are giving a little something up and we just want you to be aware.

If you are unhappy with the care you received from any physician’s office (including ours!), please call us so that we can address your concerns. Also, if you receive a bill from our office that seems wrong, please do not pay it. Call our office instead. Also, if a bill from the lab, or the radiologists seems out of order, please contact us to advocate on your behalf.

Our on call system works well 99% of the time. But once or twice each year, there is some failure in the process. If you don’t hear back from the covering physician, please call our answering service again. If you still don’t hear back or if you have an urgent issue, please just go to the emergency room at any of the various Swedish campuses. Don’t delay care waiting to hear back from us.