Choosing a Doctor

Primary Care Doctors

With an HMO plan, your primary care doctor will serve as your regular doctor, managing your care and working with you to make most of the medical decisions about your care as a patient. An HMO or a POS plan will provide you with a list of doctors from which you will choose your primary care doctor (usually a family physician, internists, obstetrician-gynecologist, or pediatrician). If you change your HMO coverage, you may also need to change your primary care physician if your current one does not accept the new HMO plan.

Tips on Choosing a Doctor

Some health insurance plans, such as HMO's, will require that you choose a primary care physician at the time of enrollment. This doctor will act as your health care guardian, so it is important to choose carefully from the doctors available to you. The best choice is to select a physician with whom you have been using previously. This physician will be most familiar with your health care needs. If your physician is not contracted with your health insurance company, you may not be able to use your current doctor if you are enrolling in a managed care health plans. When choosing a new doctor you can ask doctors you know, your friends or, family, and coworkers to recommend doctors. If you have a preferred hospital you can try to obtain a list of physicians that work with that hospital.

Once you have the names of doctors who interest you, make sure they are accepting new patients. You can obtain references and details about a particular physician by contact the American Medical Association. They provide a useful "Doctor Finder" tool on their website at http://www.ama-assn.org.

You may also want to find out if the doctor board certified? Although all doctors must be licensed to practice medicine, some also are board certified. This means the doctor has completed several years of training in a specialty and passed an exam. To get this information you can contact the American Board of Medical Specialties at 866-ASK-ABMS or visit their website at http://www.abms.org for more information.

You can also find out if complaints have been registered or disciplinary actions have been taken against the doctor. Call your State Medical Licensing Board to obtain additional information. Or, you can also contact your State department of insurance?

Before making a decision on your physician you might want to visit their office and introduce yourself as a potentially new patient.

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