Yesterday, I used the online portal to request the next available appointment with my OBGYN. Today I heard back from her office that my appointment had been scheduled for January 23. That’s fifty four days hence. Furthermore, the scheduler didn’t acknowledge the delay, provide any excuse or reason, nor make any apologies.
Of course, I know doctors are humans with familys and have time off over Christmas. I’m not a monster. And my appointment falls squarely into “non-urgent.” I’ve asked to be placed on the cancellation list, or if there are any other OBs in the facility who’d be willing to see me sooner.
The CA Department of Managed Health Care website (Timely Access to Care) states that timely access to care in this case (non-urgent specialist appointment) is fifteen days.
I called my insurer to see if there was anything they could do about this situation. I sat on hold for 24 minutes (terrible muzak, incidentally) until my call was dropped. The robot voice said, “thank you for calling, goodbye” and hung up.
Ironically, I’d just found out from the above website that health insurers are required to have a wait time for a customer service call of under 10 minutes!
I’ve sent my insurer and the doctor’s office some huffy emails. We’ll see.
How long do you wait? This Forbes article from March says the average wait time for most patients is 24 days! What can we do about this?
You can get Congress to increase the cap on Medical Residency slots so that a lot more doctors can be trained.
You can get Congress to allow foreign trained doctors from top tier programs in other countries to practice in the United States with minimal additional training instead of having to repeat almost all their training from scratch.
Oh, you can’t get Congress to do jack shit because they are too busy catering to the needs of their wealthy donors, who want enormous tax breaks and who have concierge doctors on retainer? Well tough titties, there is nothing we can do.
It is true that you can look up a list of providers, at least for PPO style health plans, and keep calling until you find one with appointment slots available sooner. If you’re HMO and they have assigned you one, then there is nothing you can do.
If it’s really urgent, you can go to Mexico or India and see an Ob/Gyn for probably about as much as your co-pay is here.
The “huffy e-mail” may get you labeled a problem patient, and they may be less inclined to call you to move the appointment up if there’s a cancellation, which is always an option.
Are you with Sutter Health? If so, that sounds about right. I have an appointment on the 13th that I requested using their online portal about two months ago. I wonder if I had called the office directly instead of using the My Health Online portal, if I would have gotten the appointment faster. They are really good about getting you in right away if it’s an urgent matter. I tore my plantar fascia on a Thursday and went to urgent care. Monday morning I was seeing the podiatrist. But for non-urgent stuff, it takes ages.
Busy doctors are busy, but they like business. It’s unlikely they’d put you off to a later appointment if they had an earlier opening. Unless you’re in their records as a “huff patient”, in which case all bets are off.
My primary doctor: 45 days.
My dermatologist: 45 to 60 days.
My opthamologist: don’t know because I schedule the next visit a year in advance.
My dentist: 30 to 40 days. (But once again, I schedule most visits 4 months in advance.)
Yes, I think it’s too long. But I also know that these doctors have large practices because the number of practicing doctors in my region is small. I often feel fortunate that I even have a doctor I can call to make an appointment.
I also often wonder what would happen if I injured myself at home and needed to see my primary doctor “immediately.” (Actually, I know. It would be a $1,200 emergency room visit at the local hospital.)
P.S. I have never benefitted from being on a cancellation list.
The last time I attempted to schedule a dermatologist appointment (my PCP referred me) the wait was 13 months. At first I was delighted when the receptionist told me the date, but then she gave the year.
I hung up. It’s probably not cancer, right? Turns out the lesion resolved spontaneously, and I saved a copay. Win-win!!
2 months for an endocrinologist. It would’ve been longer had I chosen to go into one of my HMO’s downtown centers. It must’ve finally occurred to TPTB that perhaps having more specialists in the suburbs might be a prudent idea. As it is, I lucked out with this particular doctor because she just came into the practice.
The interval between “You need surgery” appointment and the surgery itself was almost 6 months.
It depends on a lot of factors. Am I seeing my PCP or a specialist? Am I acutely ill, or do I have some new issue or is it time for my quarterly blood tests? How flexible am I about day and time? If I am ill, I can get in to see my PCP by the next day. If I want the first appointment in the morning for a blood test, it might be two or three weeks out. If I want to see my GYN on a Saturday for my yearly exam, it might be two or three months. The cardiologist- I make the next appointment ( for about 3-4 months away) when I am leaving, but I got the first appointment within a week and if I have to reschedule, I can get an appointment within 2 weeks.
Here in Western Washington I’ve never had to wait more than two weeks for an appointment–not for a routine physical, not for a specialist, not for my kid when she was on Medicaid. It’s been really good.
In central Illinois I had to schedule my physicals six months ahead of time or I was SOL, but they could always get me in for an emergency, if I wasn’t picky about which doctor I saw.
For a routine appointment? Normally less than a week, occasionally 2. I haven’t tried with my new doctor, but my old one normally could see me same day if there was an actual problem, as opposed to routine med checks and tests.
For a specialist it varies too much to be able to say, it was about 3 months last time I needed to see one, but I jumped some of the queue because I got bumped up to urgent. It’s triaged, so even people in the same area waiting for the same specialist might wait different times.
I think I posted this before, but I get occasionally quite bad eczema, and I’ve had skin staph infections a couple of time due to that. A few years back, I got one again… I realised it was probably the case at 4pm on December 23rd. First thing the following morning, I was heading off to visit parents for a week, so time was sort of urgent. From the time it I realised there was a problem to the time I had antibiotics to treat it; that is, phoning them, getting there, getting seen by my GP, going to the pharmacy and collecting the prescription, took less than an hour, all up.
The NHS ain’t perfect, but when it works well, it works really well.
Generally, no wait at all – I make an appointment for the next visit when I finish one visit. Even if it’s 3 or 6 months away.
If it’s something more urgent, I just go in to the clinic and say I need to see the doctor. I may need to wait for a few hours, but that’s acceptable – if I’m that sick, I wouldn’t be doing anything else anyway. Often have to first see a nurse, then a PA, but eventually I see a doctor.
Recently, the schedulers have been saying ‘we don’t make appointments for more than 3 months away – phone us in 3 months to make an appointment’. But if you do that, they are all booked up. So I just insist on making the 6-month appointment then. They’ll do it if you insist.
For my PCP, its about a month. I can get in same day for a real sick visit if needed at the urgent care clinic in the practice. My orthopedist was two days which shocked the hell out of me. For a dermatologist, it was about a month, until I got something that fit my schedule, and most of the others has been about the same.
We go to a really large practice that is affiliated with the a university hospital so they have specialists for everything.
It’s been less than a week for everyone but the dentist, which is usually about three months! I don’t find this acceptable, but on the other hand, it’s not an emergency, so, uh, I tend to accept it.
I don’t think I’ve had to wait more than 2 weeks to see a specialist at a hospital, and the specialist clinics I’ve been to (orthopedic, urologist, ear-nose-throat, dermatologist) have all accepted drop-ins without much more than 20 minute wait.
This is in Japan, on national health insurance. I always when I hear people talk about “the horrors of socialized medicine”.
when I hear people talk about “the horrors of socialized medicine”.