Providing Excellent Service Beyond Insurance Coverage
With the continually changing face of health care, much of medicine has come to be dictated by the business and insurance aspects of care. While health insurance companies’ and government payers reimbursement rates for medically necessary services fail to keep up with the cost to physicians to provide these services, many physicians have resorted to seeing as many patients as they can to sustain their business, resulting in less time spent with each patient.
For the physicians of Lisa Larkin, M.D., and Associates, building patient relationships and the opportunity to offer personalized, preventative care is what attracted us to medicine in the first place. Therefore, we feel that compromising the level of patient care we offer would be contradictory to our practice philosophy. Simply put, our goal is to care for our patients the way we would want to be cared for ourselves.
In order to continue offering our patients the high-quality care and accessibility they value, we have established an annual administrative fee ($75 for new patients for the first year, $55 each year thereafter) to offset the cost of services we routinely provide that are not covered by health insurance plans or Medicare. Such services include after-hours calls, billing assistance, writing and refilling of prescriptions when an appointment is not indicated, writing of prescriptions for mail order pharmacies, prior-authorization for medications and tests, completion of medical forms, advocating on a patient’s behalf to their insurance company, providing patients evidenced-based education materials, physician phone consultations, physician consultations with patient families and assistance arranging private home-care services. For a complete list, including more detail on these services, please review the Non-Covered Services section of our website.
New patients will be asked to pay the $75 fee at the time of their first appointment. Medically necessary and covered services (including office visits, in-office diagnostic testing and laboratory tests) will continue to be billed to your health insurance company or Medicare.
For patients desiring even greater physician accessibility, we offer two additional annual plans to a limited number of patients within the practice.
NOTE: Patients who only receive gynecology services from Lisa Larkin, M.D., & Associates are not subject to any annual or administrative fees.
MD Connect Plan
$500/year (covers $55 administrative fee)
The MD Connect Plan is available to a maximum of 300 patients within the practice. MD Connect Plan patients enjoy the convenience of direct e-mail access to their identified physician for non-urgent health advice (response within 72 hours). In addition, the MD Connect Plan offers patients the benefit of seeing their identified physician – rather than a partner physician or physician assistant – for urgent, same-day appointments (excluding physician vacation days or days out of the office). It also offers a dedicated incoming office phone line, reserved strictly for MD Connect Plus patients.
MD Connect Plus Plan
$1,200/year (covers $55 administrative fee)
The MD Connect Plus Plan is available to a maximum of 40 patients within the practice. This plan offers patients all the benefits of the MD Connect Plan, plus direct, 24-hours-a-day, seven-day-a-week cell phone access to their identified physician for urgent medical issues after hours (excluding physician vacations).
For more information or to sign up for an enhanced service plan please call 513.271.5111.