Top 5 Things you Need to Know to Get the Care You Need | Ep. 22

Navigating your health requires more than just showing up; it requires a strategy. Melody Mulaik breaks down the complexities into five actionable steps, so you can stop feeling powerless and start getting the high-quality, timely care you deserve.

Are you struggling to find a specialist without a three-month wait? Does your doctor rush you and type on a computer instead of listening? Are you sick and need care today? Melody provides insider strategies for all these common pain points.

Featured Topics:

• Strategically Find Your Doctor. Go beyond proximity and personal traits by seeking respected physicians who are board-certified or double-board-certified in their specialty.
• Get a Faster Appointment. Use the online scheduling portal, ask about flexibility in location, or utilize the waitlist to secure an appointment with a busy specialist quickly.
• Demand to Be Heard. Do not leave the exam room until all your questions are answered, and politely ask the staff to have the physician return if they try to rush out.

What You’ll Learn:

• [00:00] How to stop guessing and strategically find the absolute best doctor for you and your family.
• [05:58] Four key ways to get that critical appointment fast, even if you are initially told the wait is months long.
• [11:47] What to say to ensure your doctor stops rushing and listens to all your comments and questions.
• [16:55] How to schedule your appointments to significantly avoid frustrating delays and long waiting times.
• [20:00] Four simple options for getting the medical care you need immediately when your physician is unavailable today.

Want to Ask Melody? Visit: https://melodymulaik.com/ASK Don’t forget to subscribe so you won’t miss an episode. If you've ever tried to get an urgent appointment with your doctor and were told they have no availability, this episode is a must-listen

Transcript

0:13

So one thing to think about is the question always comes up of how do you find the best doctor? That's a pretty broad question because there's a lot of things that go along associated with that. What do you mean by the best doctor? Are you looking for somebody that is a general practitioner for you that's going to just really take care of kind of some basic needs? Are you looking for the super top specialist out there? Is it somebody for your kids? Is it somebody for your parents? I mean, there's a whole wide range of things that question can mean. So I think you have to spend a little bit of time and think about that a little bit when you say, what is the best doctor for you? Sometimes people will say, I want a doctor that's super close. You know, I'm sure that whatever they do is fine. I want something. From that standpoint, well, proximity comes into play, but as being somebody in healthcare, that's only a small piece for me. I want to make sure that I have the best doctor that's going to take care of myself and my family. Whenever the situation arises, I'm already thinking ahead of. Heaven forbid I need a particular oncologist to take care of cancer, or I need a specialist in a particular area. I could probably tell you that I've already done that research just because I want to be prepared. Because when you think about when you need a specialist, you're going to be very stressed out at that point. You want to already have your list put together. So you say, how do you create your list? I would say one of the first things that you do is you listen to your friends and you listen to your acquaintances and you hear them talk about their physicians. Now, everybody doesn't want to share their medical information, and we shouldn't be nosy and always asking about that. But we do have friends that are willing to share and openly do that. Is anytime somebody talks about a physician, whatever specialty, always ask, do you like that provider? Do you know physician? Do you like that particular physician? And if they say yes. Say, why do you like them? Because some people judge physicians based on personnel. Oh, they're super nice. They listen to me, and that's very important. I'm definitely not taking away from that, but I want to dig a little bit deeper. I want to know, did they handle a very critical health issue in a very good way? Are they really well known and respected? Are they board certified or they double board certified or they specialize in a particular area? Those pieces of information, and I would argue, go take notes'cause you're not going to remember all of that. It's a great example. When I had kids and I thought about a pediatrician, I had no idea who to talk to about getting a good pediatrician. And why was it important that I pick a good pediatrician? And my next door neighbor was ahead of me in the game. She was six months ahead of me having a child. And I talked to her and I said, tell me who you're going to use as your pediatrician. And she told me which group she was going to, and she told me specifically which physician she was going to use. And I asked the question, I said, tell me why you like that physician. She said he is board certified in pediatrics and an infectious disease, which is an interesting combination, and he's extremely well respected. So, of course, I went and looked him up and he was, and he became my doctor because I wanted to have that level of expertise. Now, as you know, in most pediatric practices, you don't always get to see your one physician, but he was part of a very good group. That's how I wound up with a spectacular pediatrician. And I have many stories of why that got reinforced through the years as my kids were younger doing that. But that applies to any specialty. If you're talking to somebody, think about a cardiologist, think about a gastroenterologist, which is a GI physician. So, when you reach that age where you're going to need your colonoscopies, you're going to want to know who are you going to go to, to get those particular services. So, again, talking to friends. Secondly, I would say as you're talking to physicians, meaning when you're. In a physician's office and you're having something, again, a good time to ask is, let's say, I am talking in my GI physician, so I have a GI physician. I've got a good rapport with them, and I say, Hey, if you needed a urologist, who would you go to? Or who would you send your family to? That's the way you want to ask the question, because it's not just who do you recommend? Because they, they may feel an obligation to recommend a practice or a bunch of people, but if you make it a little bit more personal, you may find that they will actually share with you who their own doctor is. They may not say that, but you want to know who your doctor's going to go to themselves or send their family to. And if you phrase it that way, you're going to get some really good information. So, asking them again in a, and you can always ask'em when you need that type of care, but asking'em when you don't need it. Again, get you some good information with that. Always though, in addition to that, do your research. Look on the internet. And granted, I know that the internet isn't always accurate, doesn't always tell us everything we need to do, but it should give a good picture of that person's footprint. And what I mean by that is you're going to know, are they into research and are they published? Not that we necessarily need that. That adds to some credibility and it adds to showing their impact within their industry. Now, do we always need the number one physician in the world for a particular topic? No, we don't, but sometimes we do. Sometimes we want to go to the best provider of a particular specialty with that, especially when you start thinking about your kids and other things like that, and I'll talk about it in a separate session of when do you go get that second opinion. And when do you travel to go to an organization that's one of the best in the world for that, it's not always an easy decision, but as you're looking at determining who should your doctor be, again, do your research. Think about what's important to you. Is it proximity? Is it reputation, is it experience? There's a whole lot of things that go into that piece, but at the end of the day, you want to make sure that you pick a physician that you're happy with, that you're comfortable with, so that you can get the care that you need. A question I commonly get asked that I think impacts everybody, whether you're talking about your own health or taking care of a child or a parent, is how do I get an appointment as quickly as possible to a provider, whether it's a general practitioner to a specialist, whomever. How do I get that appointment? And sometimes it's easy and that's not when you're having this little bit of anguish over it. But sometimes you're told you need to go to a specialist and you try to get into that specialist and you're told it's going to be three to four months to get in, and you're thinking, I don't have three to four months to get this particular issue addressed. So what do you do? Well, fortunately there's a lot of options, so I'm going to walk through really four different ways that you might think about going to get that particular appointment. The first way that I would always start is looking to see if they have an online scheduling option. So you go to their website, whether you're a new patient, establish patient. Many of the practices will allow you to select appointments on the website. You might think, well, this is a really popular doctor and there's no way I'm going to get in. Well, popular doctors have patients cancel at the last minute, and there may be openings that are quite surprising when you go onto there. So, the first thing, go look at that portal and if you find that the portal doesn't provide you an option. That is in the timeframe that you want. The second thing I would do is pick up the phone and I would call that office. Well, one thing to keep in mind, depending on the size of the organization that you're calling, that person that may pick up that phone, may either be physically sitting in the office where that physician is that you want to see. Or they may be in what we call centralized scheduling, meaning they're sitting in a group that schedules for everybody, for that particular group. So, let's say for example, you're talking about getting into an orthopedic surgeon's office. Well, that orthopedic surgeon's office may have five different locations. So, the person picking up the phone may be, again, in that location you want to go to, or they may be servicing all five locations. Well, when you call that person, you might want to go through that process of saying, what locations are they at? If you want to see a particular doctor and they say, which location are you looking at? You need to make that determination. Are you flexible? If you only want to go to a particular office, that's probably going to limit how quickly you can get in. But if you're willing to be flexible because you really want to get into that doctor, you say whatever is the first available and they will let you know the first available time for it. And many times I would almost call it a negotiation. I've had that happen many times where I say, well, tell me when's the first available here versus there. Then I can make that determination. Let's say when you talk to that person, they still just say, oh my goodness, this doctor is so busy and they've got vacation coming up. You really can't get in any sooner with that, I always ask to be put on a wait list and there is a wait list in most organizations. Now, occasionally you might come across one where they say, we don't do that, and say, well, can you make an exception for it? So, asked to be put on a wait list, and I definitely have had scenarios where I got put on a wait list and I got a call within a day or two because again, patients are canceling all the time where they called and said, Hey, can you come in at x time period on that date? So, again, that conversation with that scheduling person, they can become a really good ally for you in the process. But let's say that doesn't work. Let's say you go ahead and you get an appointment and it's a month or it's two months out and you're still not happy, you're still not comfortable with that. The third option you can look to is try to get in to talk to that physician's nurse or their physician's assistant or their administrative assistant, depending on what specialty it is and what their structure is, what their support is. But I would say there's always a way to get to them. Calling in and calling that information. And granted you're probably not going to get them on the phone, but leaving them a message, explaining the situation. They, as a general rule, they will address it for you or they will talk to the physician, especially when you're saying, hi my name is Melody Mulaik, I was referred to Dr. Smith by Dr. Jones. He really wants me to get in to see. Dr. Smith, I have this particular condition. I've tried to get an appointment as soon as possible, but it's still a month out. Here's that situation. Is there anything that you can do to help me get in to see Dr. Smith faster? Would really appreciate a call back. If you don't, I will just say you obviously, I can't promise that they're going to call you back, but nine times outta 10, I will argue they will. Not only is it good customer service, but you're telling which physician referred'em and they don't want you to go back to your original physician and say, you sent me to Dr. Smith, but Dr. Smith ghosted me and wouldn't respond, and I couldn't even get into him because then that makes Dr. Jones think about, well, why do I want to send patients over to Dr. Smith? So, that's your third option. And then I would say your fourth option, which we would almost call the nuclear option, is you physically go show up at the office. If you really have tried everything you can do. And it's a situation that you feel is so urgent that you must get attention. You go get face-to-face with somebody in that office, and you're always polite, always polite, and you say, I have tried my best to get in in a timely fashion. I tried the portal. I contacted scheduling. I was as flexible as I could be. I've got an appointment on there. I left a message with the physician's, PA nurse, whomever's appropriate. I still, after X number of days, have not got a response. I'm not going to be able to leave here until I have an appointment in a timely fashion. What can you do to work with me to make that happen? So, again, you don't want to do that unless you have to, but that is an option and I cannot imagine and physician's office that would allow you to walk in and not walk out the door with some satisfaction. Now, through this whole process, I have to continually reiterate, no matter if it gets frustrating. Always keep your cool, always be professional, always be polite. Think about yourself being on the other end of that. If you're nice to people, people as a general rule will be nice to you and they will help you. So, you always want to build those good relationships with any of the staff that you're going through the process with. So, I think doing all of this will get you the desired result the vast majority of the time. If it doesn't, then that raises other issues that we will discuss in other sessions together that talk about how do you deal with it when you've got a great physician that you want to see, but their staff maybe doesn't match the same level of courtesy and professionalism of the physician. But when we look at that challenge of getting that appointment, start with the portal, call if you have to be flexible with locations for that. If you need to take that additional step, leave a voicemail, talk to the physicians, direct staff members, and last but not least, show up in person to make things happen.​Corrine has a great question. At my last doctor's visit, my doctor was so rushed and only talked to me over her shoulder while she was typing on her computer, which was really intimidating because she wasn't listening to my comments or questions, and I didn't feel like I really had a chance to get my issues addressed. What can I do to get my doctor to stop and listen? That's a great question, and unfortunately, it's one I think that people are challenged with all the time, whether it's a primary care physician or a specialist. We're in an electronic age where the doctors have to sit and type stuff into to things, and I get that they have to do it, but that kind of misses the point of the interaction of your visit is for you to get face to face time with your physician, for you to get your questions answered. They should be asking you questions of course, but again, you need to go in with your list of questions and your list of concerns. I think a couple things that you can do. One is before it is truly one of those, many of us have seen it where the physician basically is yes, okay. And they're getting ready to walk out the door. I would always say before you go, I do have a couple of more questions for you, and it creates a pause and I get it can be intimidating and some their physicians are human beings. Some of'em are going to be super friendly and open. Other ones maybe not as much, but it's appropriate for you as a patient to say before you go, I have these questions. If you don't think to get that out of your mouth before they walk out the door, they're walking out the door, not saying, Hey, here's where you go to the checkout.'cause if they're stopping to say, here's where you go to the checkout. You have time to say Before that, I have these questions. Usually when they walk out of the room, the expectation is someone else is going to be coming in whether that's a nurse, whether that's a medical assistant. It is totally appropriate for you to say, I know the doctor has already come in and gone, but I didn't get all of my questions answered. Could you please ask the doctor to come back in? So that I can make sure that my questions get answered. Now, sometimes they might say, what are those questions? And say, I'd really like to discuss them with the doctor. It is totally appropriate to push back. You have no obligation to share with that nurse, with that medical assistant. Now, sometimes they will push and they'll say, we're on a team together. Let me just go ask them for it. Again, very politely. It is totally appropriate to say I'd really prefer to discuss this directly with my physician. Now, they may wake you wait, because you know they're seeing other pa and that's fine. You wait right, and you let them go and tell the doctor, and the doctor will come back in and they frankly may be a little agitated. I understand you have some additional questions. I do, and thank you for coming back in to answer those questions for me, so don't leave that room. Until you've gotten your questions answered, and again, it's totally appropriate to ask that staff to go have that provider come back in with it. And generally, what I have found is once that provider comes back in, it forces them to recognize that maybe that visit was a little rushed. Maybe they could have taken that time out of the gate, and I would bet that next time you come in, they're going to remember to ask you, is there anything else I can do for you? A lot of physicians have gotten into a really good habit before they walk out of the room to say, is there anything else I can do for you? Is your open-ended opportunity to share whatever you wanna share or need to share, ask whatever questions. To be clear, you are not inconveniencing the provider. You're not inconveniencing your physician. They are there for you. They are there to address your medical needs, your medical questions, your concerns with it. Never ever feel like that they're going to be mad or upset with you, or you're inconveniencing them or you're taking too much time. That is just not the case. They are there to take care of you. They are there to meet your needs. It doesn't matter if your appointment was a 15 minute block and you take 45 minutes. It is what it is. It's an average amount of time. Some people take five minutes, some take 45. Do not let that cross your mind and concern you. Make sure when you go into that visit you get what you need with that. So, always advocate for yourself. Got a question. When I go to my doctor's appointment, they're always running behind and I have to wait. How can I avoid all this waiting? How frustrating is that? I totally understand, and I bet you find that different doctor's offices have different issues with waiting and things like that. Let's break this down a little bit. You know, one things you have to think about is what your schedule is and what you can do for going to your physician's office. What I mean by that is, I get it, some people are morning people, some are afternoon. People might have to take their kids to school. There may be restrictions in terms of when they can actually see the doctor, but I think you need to think about that before you schedule your appointment. Now, if it's something where you're trying to get in as urgently as possible and you're like, I'll take whatever you can do, you may just be stuck with that a little bit. But if you have the flexibility to. Say, you know, I really want to drive when my appointment is. I would recommend you consider things like taking the first appointment of the day. Me personally, no. I'm not a morning person, but I also don't want to wait. And so when I reach out to schedule my physician appointments, and if I'm talking to a human being, I always say, tell me when you have the first available appointment or something early in the morning and what that looks like, and they'll give me several options. I have these dates or I have these locations. If I'm doing it online, I can search for that as well. So that's one thing that I do. Just so I know if I'm going to be one of the first people there, I'm not going to wait as long. I do know that I have a couple physicians that even if I pick the first appointment of the day, they always run behind and that they're going to be a little bit late. But I know at least I can plan for that. I'm not saying that that's okay, but that's a way I accommodate it. If you say, well, melody, that's great. Again, I have to take my kids to school. That's not an option for me. Well, then I would look at maybe taking that first appointment after lunch because a lot of physician practices stop and have a lunch break for their staff and they'll make a hard stop and they'll build some time into it. Some of it is catch up, but like if you can take that one o'clock appointment as an example, you might find that you're waiting a little bit less for that piece as well. If you really want to get into more detail, I would ask that whoever you're talking to, when you're scheduling, how do you schedule your appointments? And you might say, well, what does that tell me? In every physician practice, they go through a process where they determine are they going to schedule patients every five minutes, every 10 minutes, every 15 minutes? Are they scheduling multiple patients for the same time block? They might schedule time for the physician to take lunch. They might not. I would ask'em the question. I think it's a fair question. It's built into their system with that, and that might enlighten you as to when you want to pick an appointment. The other thing that I would ask as you are nice and friendly to that person that is scheduling, I would ask them and I would say, you know, I really have a pretty tight timeframe, but what do you recommend is the best time to come? When you don't think I'll have to wait as much. And that staff probably has some enlightenment and some feedback that you might not be aware of to help you with that. So again, enlist the staff to let you know. Think about when you can get there as early as possible. I always really try to avoid the last appointment of the day, and you might think, well, isn't that great? Because aren't they going to be in a hurry to get out? But yes, but in that contrary to everything else you want in terms of getting all your questions answered, making sure they're spending enough time with you, I always try to avoid the last appointment of the day. And again, I know sometimes you can avoid it, but doing what you can to try to pick appointments that are going to fit with your schedule and also be compatible with the least amount of delays within that practice is important. One other thing that I'll add to it is sometimes physicians don't know the amount of waiting time that you've actually experienced, and I always think it's appropriate if you find that you're in a situation where you've waited a long time, always tell your physician, your practitioner, whether it's your nurse practitioner or your PA or your physician, do it nicely. Again, nobody wants to be complained to, but you can let them know. You know, you may not be aware, but I've actually been waiting an hour. Just wanted to let you know, I'm not sure if this is a common practice, and if they say, yeah, that happens, say, well, what can we do to avoid that in the future? Again, there's positive and productive ways to try to educate the providers and hopefully make some changes. So again, look at your schedule, look at how the practice schedules with that, and try to get into those times that will provide or give you the least amount of waiting. What do you do if you need to get into see a physician today and you find you're not able to, maybe you know you're sick, you need medication, you've got a sinus infection, ear infection, whatever. It's not life threatening. You need medication.'cause you know you're just going to continue to go downhill if you don't get treatment. So you call your physician's office, they tell you they don't have any appointments, you've gone through the process to try to get in and you think, gee, what else am I going to do? You actually have a lot of options with that. So what we're going to talk about is the four options that you could look at to make sure that you do get the care you need today. Now I say that assuming you're going to be in a physical location where you can get. To a provider, but let's say that you're in a location where there's not providers immediately close by. I would argue that these are also options for you as well. So first thing you want to do is if you go to a provider that's part of a healthcare system that has a web portal, many of those offer what's called virtual visits, meaning you can set up an appointment to see somebody via your phone, via your computer with that. And so if that's an option, you may look to see, do they have any appointments available today? Because most of those, you do have to schedule it as an appointment. So that's one option. But let's say you go look at that and you say maybe they have it. There's no availability today, or maybe that's not an option for me. Second option would be, let's go look at your insurance company's website. You say, why do I go look at my insurance company's website? Many of the larger insurance companies have agreements with companies that provide virtual visits. So if you go to your website, you may even see on the homepage virtual visit. They've cut a deal with them and you may have to pay a$5,$10, who knows? But some small dollar amount to do that. If that's an option, click the button and you will see someone probably pretty quickly. Usually when you do those, usually you can get seen within an hour or two. If you go through that option, let's say you go to your insurance company's website, that's not an option for it. There's other services out there, and I'm not going to promote one or the other. I'm going to be neutral, but there are some other services that are out there and you can Google or look at those to just say virtual visits or online visits, and these visits will pop up. And you can click on those and look at it. Now, some of those may have an affiliation with your insurance and it may say, Hey, if you're a patient of X, Y, Z insurance company, it's only X dollars. You may have to pay out of pocket. So they generally will explain that on the webpage right up front. But there are several companies out there that just provide this virtual visit component of it. So, let's say that you've gone through those options. Okay, i've looked at my provider, no virtual visit, my insurance company doesn't have anything. I've tried one of these virtual visits and maybe they're not allowed in my state, or they don't have availability, or I don't find a way to do it. Then that's when you have to look to say, okay, I need to go to an urgent care. And most communities have some sort of urgent care. Maybe it's an urgent care that's freestanding. Meaning it's an independent building with that, it may or may not be affiliated with a local healthcare system. A lot of our pharmacies, national pharmacies, have urgent cares built into them. Some will allow you to schedule appointments in advance. I always go look at the websites to see can I schedule an appointment so I'm not sitting there for hours? So always look at that piece of it, but if there's an urgent care, you should be able to get into that urgent care, that date of service as well. And then, last but not least, and I say this is very much last but not least, there is your emergency room. And just to be clear, the emergency rooms should only be used for true emergencies because that's what slows things down. When you go to the emergency rooms, there's a lot of people showing up that are not true emergencies, but that is your final safety net. If you really can't get into somebody else, you're fine that you're getting sicker, and that's a worst case scenario. To be clear, I'm not advocating ER emergency room unless it's an emergency. But that again, as your absolute last resort, that is an option for you. So, if you need care on a given day, there is a way to get it. Again, website of your provider, looking at your insurance company, looking potentially at a national firm or a firm online that offers those virtual visits or showing up in person to an urgent care facility. Whatever the situation, there's always a way to get the care that you need.