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| Choose Your Managed Care Doctors |  The first thing that many managed care plans, mainly health maintenance organizations (HMOs), will do is ask you to choose a primary care doctor. Your primary care doctor will provide you routine check-ups and will examine you when you are ill.
Your primary care doctor is the most important partner in your health care plan. He or she will coordinate your health care and sends you to a specialist or hospital if you need it.
Because of this fact, it is very important to trust your doctor and feel comfortable talking with him or her about all health issues that concern you.
Your primary care doctor is a generalist. He or she can be an internist, a general practitioner, or a family practice doctor. These doctors deal with the whole body.
In case if you want to have a specialist as your primary care doctor, ask your plan. Thus, some women may want to have a gynecologist as their primary doctor. At first, you have to talk to your specialist about this. The point is that some specialists do not want to coordinate your health care needs because they may not be comfortable working on medical problems outside their area of expertise.
When choosing a primary care doctor you should:
- Be curious about if you can interview the doctor. You may do it either by telephone or personally. This will give you a feeling of comfortable. Talk about what you expect from a doctor and what doctor will expect from you. You might have to pay for this interview with your own money, but it is worth.
- Talk to other clients about what they like and don’t like about different doctors.
- Search for doctors' education, training and special interests. Try to select board certified doctors because they have taken extra training and passed tests in certain areas of medicine.
- Get to know about any complaints or actions taken against doctors in your state health department.
- Check whether the doctor is taking new patients because some of them limit the number of their new patients.
- Find out how long you must wait for an appointment. In most cases the length of your wait will depend on the kind of problem you have.
- Learn how easy it is to see the doctor during the evening or on weekends in an emergency.
- Ask about the doctor’s office position, perking availability, and whether you can get there by public transport.
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