Evergreen Newsletter
September 2018
We hope you've had a great summer!
Well Child Check-Ups
Why are these visits
important?
Well child checkups are important parts of comprehensive pediatric care. Visits are recommended throughout infancy, childhood, and adolescence. The purpose of these visits is to help families keep children healthy as well as to pick up early signs of potential problems. These visits are so important to a child’s health that most insurance companies pay for them.
The benefits of Well-Child Visits:
• Prevention. Your child gets scheduled immunizations to prevent illness. You also can ask your provider about nutrition and safety in the home and at school.
• Tracking growth and development. See how much your child has grown in the time since your last visit, and talk with your provider about your child's development. You can discuss your child's milestones, social behaviors and learning.
• Raising concerns. Make a list of topics you want to talk about with your child's provider such as development, behavior, sleep, eating or getting along with other family members. Bring your top three questions or concerns to discuss at the visit.
• Team approach. Regular visits create strong, trustworthy relationships among the providers at Evergreen, parent/caregiver and child. This team approach helps develop optimal physical, mental and social health of a child.
*Article written by Dr. Heidi Beery
Evergreen Walk-In Well Child Visits
Preventative Exam at Your Convenience
We are happy to announce that EFM is now offering a service to our patients known as a Walk-In Well Child Visit. Monday - Friday, 8:30am-4:30pm, pediatric patients can walk in for a thorough preventative exam; no appointment necessary.
Medical Students at Evergreen
All of us are students. An often unspoken, but important role of EFM is that of teaching. At every level of our organization, there is an educational function. We have Physicians in Residency, Medical students, Physician Assistant students, Nurse Practitioner students rotating with our providers. We have an internal Medical Assistant certification program as well as nursing students from UCC rotations at EFM. Physicians and nurses are continuously recertified in basic and advanced cardiopulmonary life support. EFM has regular ongoing education for all of their providers and nursing staff. We have medical coding classes for our billers, training for receptionist and others. We are committed to a cycle of constant learning and teaching, to improve our own skills and educate the next generation of caregivers.
Dr. Tim Powell
Why we love working here:
"I love the patient interaction. No matter what is going on in my day, I get the chance to put a smile on someone else's face."
-Kristina
"Working here is like having an extended family. The employees work together to make each other feel welcomed. The friendships I have made here are incredible." -Bri
"I love my coworkers and management, and I love working somewhere that really cares about their patients. I have never been to a doctor's office that cares as much as Evergreen does and it is refreshing to be a part of that." -Trasina
SWAG NIGHT
In August, we hosted a Student Wellness And Game night at our Myrtle Creek Office. This was our first time putting on an event like this. There were games, food, and prizes, but our favorite part was that 80 students from the community were seen for their Sports Physicals and Wellness visits! We plan to host another SWAG night next summer at both our Myrtle Creek and Roseburg offices.
MYRTLE CREEK FESTIVAL
We enjoyed hosting a booth at the festival and greeting members of the community.
CALL CENTER
We launched our first call center seat in Family Practice. We plan to launch two more seats in October & November to help shorten our hold times on the phone.
NEW PATIENT PROCESS
Our number of staff that helps with the new patient process at Evergreen has been tripled to make the process faster. We welcomed 140 new patients into our practice in August alone!
EVERGREEN TALKS
We held another Evergreen Talks at Mercy at the end of August. Our Director of Integreated Behavioral Health, Dawn Brumfield, gave a presentation on emotional health and wellness. The next Evergreen Talks will be on Thursday, December 6th, on the topic of Dementia. We look forward to seeing you!
DENTAL DAYS
Advantage Dental spent 3 days examining pediatric patients' teeth here in the office. This is something we coordinate every summer to make it easier on parents for children to have their dental exams done.
NO MORE PAGERS
We discontinued the pager system that we previously gave our patients during check-in at our Main clinic. Instead of "buzzing" patients when it was time to go back, we now call the patient's name in the waiting room.
SELF CHECK-IN
Upstairs at our Main location, we now have a self check-in kiosk. This can be used by returning Family Practice patients whether they have checked in online or are starting the check-in process on site. Ask the front desk if you have any questions!
What We Did This Summer:
We said goodbye to summer with our annual company picnic.
Each year, we celebrate the fun of working at Evergreen with an event employees can bring their families to. We had delicious food, good music, games, a dessert competition (that Carolyn, pictured below, won), and fun prizes. The weather was perfect and a good time was had by all.
Did you know Urgent Care has special slots reserved for Family Practice patients? If you call Family Practice and there are no openings available, the receptionists are able to schedule you in the Urgent Care. If scheduled in one of these special slots, you will still follow normal check in routine in Urgent Care, but your appointment will be expedited.
Patient
Portal
At Evergreen, we use the Patient Portal to communicate with our patients, deliver lab results, send chart notes after visits, etc.
The Portal is a fast and secure way to communicate with your provider. You can safely and quickly contact your clinical team directly and bypass wait times on the phone.
On the Portal, you can view your outstanding lab orders and incoming results, you can view your vaccination history, you can request upcoming appointments, and more!
Signing up for the Patient Portal is simple, just ask one of our front desk staff to sign you up at your next appointment or call the office today.
There are so many benefits to using the Portal. Have you signed up yet?
Understanding Deductible, Co-pay, and Co-insurance
Deductible:
The amount that you pay, each year, for covered services, before the insurance will pay on your claims.
Co-pay:
A fixed amount that you pay for a visit with your provider. Co-pays are determined by your insurance plan and may be different for Urgent Care or specialists than for your primary care provider. Co-pays are due at the time of service. *
Co-insurance:
The amount that you pay, each year for covered services before the insurance will pay on your claims. *
Out-of-Pocket:
The maximum amount that you pay for covered services, within a plan year. After you reach the out-of pocket maximum, your insurance will pay 100%.
* Some insurance plans have both co-pays and co-insurance while others only have one.
FAQs
from Our Billing Department:
Why didn't my insurance pay for my visit?
Most insurance policies only cover medically necessary visits and procedures, referred to as covered services. It is the patient’s responsibility to know what their insurance plan does and does not cover. Your insurance may have a website, or may have mailed you a copy of your benefits, which explains your coverage, or you may call the member services number, which is found on your insurance card.
My co-pay is usually $20.00, why are you billing me for a $50.00 co-pay?
Some reasons that your co-pay may be different:
In-network vs. Out-of-Network:
In-network means that our clinic is contracted with your insurance. Out-of-Network means that the clinic is not contracted with your insurance plan and you may be responsible for a higher co-pay amount, or you may have a co-insurance amount instead of, or in addition to, a co-pay. If you live in another county, or state, your insurance plan may consider your visit to be Out-of-Network.
Visit Types:
Some insurance plans have multiple co-pay amounts, depending on the type of visit. For example, you may have a $20.00 co-pay when you are seen in Family Practice, but you have a $50.00 co-pay when you are seen in Urgent Care. Also, you may have a different co-pay for a Behavioral Health visit, (i.e. Dr. Yates), or a visit with a specialist, (i.e. Dr. Clyde).
Medicare Annual Wellness Visits
Annual Wellness Visits are a benefit Medicare intended for you to receive and strongly encourages us to provide. We'd like to explain why.
Each year Medicare covers an Annual Wellness Visit at no extra cost to you. We at Evergreen Family Medicine are happy to offer this service to you through our Wellness Program. While your primary care provider works hard all year long to keep you healthy, oftentimes the acute concerns of regularly scheduled visits prevent a deep dive into wellness medicine. Because of that we have developed a special wellness program which is coordinated by two of our specially trained nurses who serve as our
annual wellness coordinators. These nurses are supervised by various providers in the clinic who offer additional recommendations as may be needed.
You may ask, "So, what is so special about a wellness visit?" This especially designated time allows our wellness nurses to review and update your past medical and family history, make sure that any screening tests that are appropriate have been completed and update needed vaccinations.
Medications are reviewed and updated. Information about advanced care planning is provided as well. As providers, initially we were skeptical about the benefit of this program for
patients. But as the program has developed, we have found it has really helped our patients as many of these screening tests were overlooked in the business of daily visits scheduled to review medical problems. Additionally it has opened appointment spaces in the primary care schedule, allowing for more timely access when you're really sick and want to see your provider.
As always, our goal is to improve your health so we hope you will take advantage of this service offered to you by Medicare and Evergreen Family Medicine! If you would like to schedule, please contact our office.
About AWV + part of denial letter
Provider
feature
Allie Blaine, PA
Allie works in our Urgent Care, and her bright spirit lights up the room! Let's get to know her.
When asked for a few random facts about herself, Allie said she has three incredible siblings, two adorable nieces and one nephew, and two more on the way. She likes to do anything outdoors with her family - hiking, biking, swimming, skiing, snowmobiling, and laughing are some of her favorite things. Her freshman year of college she was on the women's rowing team at the University of San Diego. And she skipped the eighth grade!
If she could choose to visit anywhere, Zermatt, Switzerland is number 1 on her list. She loves yoga, fishing, paddle boarding, rafting. She also loves to dance and used to teach dance fitness classes.
Allie's husband, Kirk, is the Blue Zones Project, Project Manager here in Douglas County. Have you heard of the Blue Zones Project yet? Evergreen is proud to be 50% complete for becoming a Blue Zone Approved Work site. We want to empower each other to dramatically improve our well-being. By being a healthy work site we can make the healthy choice the easy choice. Evergreen hopes to lead the way to positively affect the larger community, because the healthier our community, the easier healthy choices become.
