Your Visit

In an effort to make sure you have the best possible experience in our office, we have provided some guidelines below that will help you know what to expect when you visit us.

Open/Close Before You Arrive

You will receive a notification from our office regarding your appointment. These notifications can be sent via text or voice. Let our office know if we need to change the way you are notified. Please reply to these notifications to let us know if you will make it to your scheduled appointment.

Open/Close At the Front Desk

After you arrive at our office on appointment day, the Pediatric Place staff will update your information, collect co-pays, and get you checked into our computer system. We will verify your contact info every visit to make sure we can get in touch with you if we need to; you might be surprised how often phone numbers and email addresses change. We also will ask to see your insurance card, as insurances can also change quite frequently.

Open/Close In the Reception Area

You will notice we have a well and sick waiting area, so please enter the area designated for your child’s visit. While you’re waiting in our reception areas, staff members are busy seeing other patients and preparing the exam room for your visit. Please be patient, and we will call you into a room as soon as possible.

We try, of course, to be as fast and efficient as possible. However, we can't always predict when other concerns, problems, or even emergencies will arise. Additionally, we always want to give every one of our patients as much time as we need to make the best possible assessment, to provide the best possible care, and, of course, to answer all your questions and concerns. We do our best to let you know when our staff is running behind, but please feel free to ask for an update if it seems like you’ve been waiting for a long time.

Open/Close In the Exam Room with a Nurse

Once your child is brought back to the Exam Room, one of our nurses will measure vital signs and ask some necessary medical history questions, which allows your physician, especially in the case of a sick visit, to get a quick picture of what's going on before entering the room. This is all important information for the provider that helps guide the treatment. (Sometimes your physician will ask similar questions, but that’s because they’re trying to pinpoint things just a little more clearly.)

All of our nurses are trained in pediatrics, so they’re prepared to spot any warning signs or “red flags” that come up when taking vitals and history. If they see a sign for concern — if, say, a child who came in for cough and cold symptoms is wheezing and breathing rapidly — they’ll move quickly to get an available physician into the room right away. Situations like this are one reason you may sometimes have a longer-than-usual wait; we’ll skip over appointment order if it’s necessary to safeguard the health and safety of one of our patients.

Open/Close In the Exam Room with a Physician

Once your physician reviews the history and asks if you have any other questions or concerns, he or she will begin the exam. Once your physician has finished the well visit or has made a diagnosis and recommended treatment for a sick visit, your child may need immunizations, testing, or treatments in the office. If that’s the case, your provider will alert your nurse or lab technician, who will prepare — and then deliver — whatever is needed to complete your child’s appointment.

Open/Close After You Leave

Once you walk out the door, we still haven’t completed your visit; a few important things are still happening inside our offices.

First, your physician will complete all notes and documentation and will record them into your chart. Once the visit notes are complete, you can see a summary of them in your Patient Portal account. (Although they're usually available by the end of the day, notes can sometimes take up to 2 or 3 days to appear on the portal.)

Once the office notes have been completed, they’re reviewed by our posters — the members of our staff who attach charges to bills and make sure they’re correct — before our billers submit them to your insurance company.

Once the bill has been submitted to your insurance company, our billers follow the charges and update your account after payment is received. We may not know until then whether there are certain charges or parts of your bill that your individual insurance plan did or did not cover. If there’s a balance due, our billers will send a paper statement.