As a consultant, it’s been years since I’ve had good health insurance. My current health plan is not ideal, so my goal is to use up all the benefits before I cancel it. Aetna’s website has a feature for you to find a doctor, pharmacy or facility, however, if you are logged in, you will get an error message saying “We’re sorry. DocFind is currently unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience and are working to make DocFind available again soon.” The only way to look for a doctor is to logout of your account, then search the public version. Terrible user experience.
I finally resigned myself to making a doctor appointment for my migraines. So the first and second doctors I picked for internal medicine doctor with Valley Health Center, had me to navigate through a phone menu but got a message saying it will take 2 to 4 weeks to get a primary care physician assigned. My current insurance doesn’t need a primary care physician so I moved on. I have PPO, not sure what this means, except you can pick your own doctor and you pay less if they are “in network”, more if you pick a doctor outside the network.
Third doctor’s office had a fax number listed as their main number. The fourth doctor’s office had a real human answer the phone. I told the woman who answered, I have Aetna Open Choice PPO and I would like to make an appointment for my migraines, are you taking new patients? She immediately said yes, had an appointment for Friday morning and asked for the medical ID number and phone number and voila…appointment set!
I tried looking on Yelp for a doctor near my office who specializes in migraines except it kept giving me chiropractors. My approach in calling doctors offices one after the other on the “in network” list and selecting the first one that made it easy to make an appointment may seem haphazard. However, my logic is that if I’m super sick or during an emergency, the last thing I want is to be stuck in a phone tree.
How do you pick your doctors? Leave your pro tips in the comments.
What are your thoughts?