When moving to a new area, your primary concerns might lie in finding a new house and a new job, so finding a new dentist, eye doctor, or primary care provider might not even cross your mind until something goes wrong. If you haven’t gotten a chance yet to select a new primary care provider, and you’re in a quick pinch, don’t just call around looking for whoever is accepting new clients the soonest–just visit the clinic so you can get quick care without feeling a need to commit to a particular office. You want to find a primary care provider who you feel comfortable sticking with for a while, so they can get to know what ‘normal’ means for your health. Not only this, but your primary care provider is also something that will be kept on record for your insurance and your pharmacy, so you must take your time in selecting the right one. Here are some tips to help you along in your process.
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Consulting Your Insurance Provider
Not every healthcare provider accepts every type of insurance plan, so the first step in finding the right primary care provider is finding which local offices are covered by your insurance company. For many insurance companies, you can go onto their website and search directly through them to find primary care providers that accept the type of insurance coverage that you use. Oftentimes, if you use this tool to search for a provider, you’ll also be able to see reviews written by other patients who use your same coverage, so you’ll be able to get insight into how well your coverage works for the services that each office provides. If you don’t find a lot of reviews for local healthcare providers through the website for your insurance, then just type whatever results come up into google and you’re sure to find reviews there! If your insurance provider doesn’t have a website or an option on their website that allows you to search for local healthcare providers, then you can always call the number on the back of your insurance card to get recommendations–oftentimes, they’ll start by recommending whatever office is closest to you, so be sure to do some further research into the quality of these practices before you commit to any of them.
Consult Your Peers
If you’ve recently moved to a new area and need a new primary care provider, then consider asking your coworkers for recommendations. More than likely, they’ll be glad to steer you away from having to go through any negative experiences they’ve had with inexperienced or unprofessional healthcare providers. Another bonus to asking your coworkers for healthcare provider recommendations is that–if you get your healthcare coverage through your workplace–they more than likely have the same insurance as you, so you’re almost guaranteed to find a quality primary care provider whose services are covered by your insurance plan.
Prioritize Location
You should want to receive the best care that your insurance coverage allows, but you shouldn’t completely sacrifice convenience to get it. Selecting a great primary care provider who is located over an hour away just simply doesn’t make sense, especially if there are plenty of comparable primary care providers much closer to where you live. You have to keep in mind that scheduling will be much more difficult, since you’ll probably have to take an entire day or afternoon off of work each time you need to see your primary care provider, while, if you choose a more local provider, you could schedule appointments to coincide with a lunch break. You must also consider that, for some procedures, you might not be able to drive home by yourself afterward. The hour-long drive into Chicago might not be an issue for you, but whatever friend or coworker you rope into helping you out is unlikely to appreciate it.
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Don’t Settle
If, after your long and grueling search, you find that the primary care provider you selected is not everything that you had dreamed they would be, then you shouldn’t feel the need to stick with them. Your primary care provider must be someone you feel that you can trust. You need to find someone who listens to you when you voice your concerns and takes you seriously, putting in all the effort they can to find the causes for any new symptoms that might arise instead of just brushing them off, saying something along the lines of ‘we’ll keep an eye on that.’ It can be intimidating to start your search over, but finding the right primary care provider is essential to ensuring your health.