It is a challenging way to start the new year. After three months of what you thought were some good conversations about your 15-year old daughter’s weight you were alarmed the last night before going back to school after Winter Break you caught a glimpse of your daughter’s alarmingly slight body. You asked her to join you upstairs and to step on the scale. You were disappointed and concerned to know that her weight was perilously close to 100.
When she headed off to school the next morning you immediately got online and started reading primary care physician reviews. For while you and your daughter have had a brief discussion with your current family pediatrician about the topic, you were disappointed in the doctor’s comment. Although your daughter had lost a significant amount of weight in the year since the last check up, the pediatrician simply commented that the weight was still within the acceptable range on the Body Mass Index (BMI). You, too, were trying to avoid being an alarmist, but you were very disappointed that the pediatrician you had been seeing since your children were born was not responding a little more aggressively.
The primary care physician reviews online take awhile to go through, but you are looking for responses that point toward a provider that has had success intervening with weight loss situations with teenage girls. It is a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack, but you are feeling desperate to make sure that you are following the best course of action.
Primary Care Physician Searches Can Help You Locate the Best Options for Your Family
According to current data, America will be in need of as many as 52,000 more primary care physicians by the year 2025. With information like this it is no wonder that it is sometimes difficult to get a new patient appointment even after you have used primary care physician reviews to select a doctor. As a result, many people look to primary care physician reviews not only for information about the kind of care that is administered, but also for information about office wait times and appointment availability.
In a time when the nation has more people with access to insurance than we have seen in the past, it probably should come as no surprise that these primary care offices are so busy. As a result, however, the medical field continues to look for ways to provide a variety of services to the nation. From urgent care facilities that offer free STD testing centers to low cost health clinics that offer affordable family quick care appointments.
Moving Away from Traditional Health Care Platforms of the Past
In the past, individuals and families turned to two different platforms for their health care needs. In the majority of situations, family physicians and pediatricians met the needs of most people looking for health care. Even sitting in a waiting room for an hour did not make enough of an inconvenience to have families look for other options, because there were very few other options.
The only other option that people had was a visit to the emergency room. In the past, in fact, a trip to the emergency room was where you went if you had a health concern on the weekends or after office hours. The emergency wait room times, however, were also a challenge. In fact, between the years of 2003 and 2009, the mean wait time in ERs across the country went up by 25%, from 46.5 minutes to 58.1 minutes. In addition to an increased wait time, the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey also reports that the average ER visitor saw an increase in costs. For instance, most ER patients pay total costs of $1,318 and a mean cost of $615.
As a solution to the increasingly busy, and sometimes expensive, family care physician and ER visits, many other platforms have developed. In fact, an entire industry has developed that offers quick care settings that provide walk in appointments with qualified doctors and at affordable prices. Still accepting insurance, these clinics also often provide a black and white posting of prices for some of the most common appointment needs.