Complete Care Medicine Gilbert Family Doctor Office Policies

 

Office Policies

Thank you for choosing Dr. Herrera and Complete Care Medicine as your primary care specialist. We
Welcome you! We are committed to providing the finest personalized and professional care possible for our patients. We hope the following information will help answer some of your questions and help you understand how our office operates.

Office Hours

Monday through Thursday 8:00am to 5:00pm *Friday 8:00am to 12:00pm

*Friday afternoon is reserved for sick visits only and appointments must be made that morning. Office will close once all Friday sick visit appointments are completed.

Scheduling Appointments

Appointments can be schedules by phone, in person or online through the patient portal. We ask that all patients arrive 10 minutes before the scheduled appointment time.

Cancellation Policy

We realize patients may need to change their appointments, however, we require a 24-hr notification of cancellation for appointments so we may offer that time to another patient. If you repeatedly fail to notify us of your intent to cancel in a timely manner or repeatedly no show for your appointments, we reserve the right to offer you appointments on a walk in basis only. We also reserve the right to charge a 30.00 no show fee.

Payment

Payment will be requested at the time of service for all services which are non-covered or determined to be patient’s responsibility, including co-payments and deductibles.

Medication Refills

Patient’s may be given (with some exceptions) medication prescription refills for six months at a time.

We will not be authorizing refill requests from your pharmacy. Please take the “no refills” message on the prescription bottle as a reminder to schedule your next office visit. If lab tests are required, please mention it when you schedule your appointment.

Please understand that this policy is for your safety and in your best interest. We care enough to be sure that you are being treated properly for your ongoing medical care.

After Hours

Prescription refills, appointment scheduling, and long term illnesses should be handled during routine office hours. If you have a medical question that cannot wait until normal office hours, an on-call provider will be able to assist you by calling the after hours line.

If you have a life-threatening emergency, call 911 or go immediately to the nearest emergency room.

Insurance Claims/billing

Complete Care Medicine participates with most major insurance carriers. As a courtesy to our patients, we will file insurance claims for those insurances with which we participate. However, please note knowledge of your insurance contract and its limitations, co-pays and deductibles are not our responsibility. Any denials or adjustments made by your insurance company are ultimately your responsibility. If the patient fails to provide us with all the correct information, they are financially responsible for the office visit charges.

Dr. Herrera is a primary care provider; therefore some insurance may require you to make us your PCP in order for us to treat you.

Referrals

When your provider suggests a specialist evaluation or diagnostic testing that requires a referral, we will make every effort to provide this for you as soon as possible. Some referrals require insurance preauthorization and cannot be processed immediately. Insurance guidelines prohibit us from backdating referrals. We require three business days for the processing of routine referrals.

Labs/Testing/Imaging

For all normal labs or studies requiring no further workup or referral you will be notified of the results by our office staff over the phone. If the results are abnormal, you will be required to be seen and results will be given to you in person. We realize your time is valuable, however, as abnormal results usually require additional testing or planning, we prefer to deliver them in person.

Pain Medications

Here at Complete Care Medicine, we recognize chronic pain is real and at times debilitating. We also realize that the medications that are used to treat chronic pain have a high potential for abuse and addiction. Furthermore, we believe that special training and experience is required to properly control chronic pain without causing addiction. For that reason, we do not treat chronic pain but prefer to refer our patients with chronic pain to a pain management specialist. Although we may use short term narcotics to treat acute, new onset pain, we will not write long term or certain types of narcotics. If you are under the care of a pain management specialist and wish to change specialists, we suggest that you obtain your monthly refill and then allow us to assist you to find a new specialist before your medication(s) run out.