Before Your Appointment
Your help in preparing for your first visit with us will make sure that your appointment goes as smoothly as possible. Before you leave home the day of your appointment, please make sure you have the following items at the time of your appointment :
- A complete list of all medications that you are taking, including over-the-counter drugs and vitamins. Please prepare a list of these medications, with the correct spelling of the names, and the doses. Bring in the name and telephone number of your pharmacy so we can place this in your chart, in case we need to call in prescriptions for you in the future.
- The complete name of each physician who cares for you, as well as their numbers and addresses. We will be sending them consultation notes to keep them informed about what we are doing for you. We may also need to discuss your care with them so that nothing we do or prescribe interferes with the medications and care they are providing for you. With your help, we can do our best to keep your doctors informed.
- Completed and signed medical history and personal information forms. If we had enough time before your scheduled appointment, you will have received in the mail medical history and personal information forms. Please complete and sign the forms and bring them with you, along with your list of medications and the physician information. If you didn't receive these in the mail, please come to the office at least 15 minutes before your scheduled appointment since we will give them to you to complete as soon as you arrive at the office.
- Your current insurance card(s) and any required referral forms. We are sorry, but our physicians really cannot see you without any required referral forms and the necessary insurance information. We also expect payment of your co-payment at the time of your visit and appreciate your help in bringing along a check or cash for that purpose.
What to Expect at Your Appointment
- Most new patient visits take approximately 1.5 hours, so please plan enough time from your schedule to allow you to stay and complete all the necessary tests.
- Your eyes will be dilated, after the nurse does an initial evaluation and history. It takes a half hour for the eye drops to work well enough for the physician to examine your eyes and see everything clearly. Your eyes will remain dilated for several hours after you leave our office. For this reason, we want you to bring someone with you to drive you home; it will be difficult if not impossible for you to drive yourself.
- The exam requires the use of a very bright light. It may be uncomfortable, but it won't harm your eyes.
- Many patients who come in for their first visit for retina evaluation require additional testing, quite often including what we call a fluorescein angiogram. To have this test, the staff will inject dye into a vein in your arm and then rapid sequence photographs of your retina will be made. This dye allows the physician to have much clearer visualization of the blood vessels of the eye and to determine more accurately whether there has been any damage to them. Patients with Diabetes and Macular Degeneration almost always have to have this test, and we want to do it the same day as your appointment so you do not have to schedule another visit just for the test.
- At the end of your exam and all testing, your physician will sit down with you to discuss his findings and answer your questions.
Office Hours, Appointment Schedules, and Patient Emergencies
We want to make sure you understand our policies regarding emergencies. Unfortunately, many patients with retina problems must be seen on an unscheduled, emergency basis. These patients may have a retinal detachment, retinal tears, severe eye infections, eye trauma, or other serious problems requiring immediate attention. Because these patients must be seen immediately in order to preserve vision, we ask your patience and understanding if your appointment time is delayed while we take care of these patients. We try to leave room in the schedule for emergencies, but we cannot always predict how many emergencies will present to our office, or how much time we will need to treat these emergencies.
We know you would want to be accommodated yourself for an emergency and will understand if another patient is in that situation. We do everything possible to try to maintain the schedule in spite of emergencies and will do our best to get back on track when this happens. Thank you for your patience and understanding if this affects your appointment time. You may feel free to check with our staff if you have been waiting more than 20 minutes and, if necessary because of emergencies, reschedule your appointment in order to avoid a lengthy delay. Our staff will be glad to help you make informed decisions about whether you can wait longer or if it would be better for your personal schedule to make a new appointment. In the event that you want to reschedule, we will get you back in the office as quickly as possible.
Welcome!
We know that the information we have provided here is a lot for you to review, but by giving you as much information as possible before your appointment, we hope to make the experience in our office smoother and more pleasant for you. We welcome you as a new patient. We consider it a privilege that you have chosen us as your physicians, and we will work hard to honor your trust in us.