Fairmount Pediatrics
Fairmount Pediatrics
Three Things To Know About a "Vaccine-Only" visit.
Feb 14, 2024
Three Things To Know About A Vaccine-Only Visit
When you book your appointments, you will see that you can choose a Medical Assistant Visit, for either office. Here are some questions you may have:
- When you book for the Medical Assistant, you will NOT have an appointment with the doctor or physician assistant, but you still might see them for a minute or two. If you scheduled for a vaccine-only appointment, the doctor or physician assistant will stick their head in to see if you have any questions about the vaccine. They can answer questions about side effects, for example, and they will make sure the right vaccine is ordered.
- You do NOT need a vaccine-only appointment if you do have a well visit or sick visit appointment. In that case, you booked to see the doctor or physician assistant, and that provider will see you, and cover whatever topics you wanted covered, and some of their own, as well. Then, after discussing the vaccines with you, they will order the right ones and the medical assistant will come in at the end, to give the vaccines. No separate appointment is needed for the medical assistant -- it's included!
- What vaccines are available? We have Sanofi vaccines for the infant series, both in combinations and as single vaccines (for example, you might want Vaxelis which gives DTaP, Polio, Hib and Hep B all in one needle, or you might prefer to get these as separate vaccines). We have all the routine vaccines required for school entry. And we have the COVID vaccines available for 6 month olds and older.
To schedule your Medical Assistant appointment, click on the “SCHEDULE APPT” tab at the top of the page. This will take you to our scheduling tool. To schedule, please select the Medical Assistant in whichever office you usually use. (If you have an HMO, you can ONLY use your usual office. If you have a PPO, you can use both offices.)
For more information and answers to frequently asked questions about appointments, please visit our "Appointments" page or our Vaccine page under Resources.
Take a look at the schedule for upcoming support groups and workshops, hosted by Liv Lee, our registered dietitian nutritionist.
If your child is vomiting, you need to know what to do! Here are instructions, step by step, for you!
Philadelphia office every Tuesday, 10:30-11:30 am. Montco office, every Wedneday, 10-11
How We Run On Time By Alexis Lieberman, MD When I meet other doctors, the subject of how we run our our offices often comes up. When I mention that we run on time, most doctors are shocked. How do you do it?! they ask. This post is to tell you how we do it. When I used to work at a large hospital clinic, we often ran 3 hours behind. You read that correctly - three hours! The doctors would sit around waiting in the back, wishing we could see the patients, and the patients would wait in the front, getting angrier and more frustrated, not to mention hungry! I loved my patients, but I hated the way we ran. There wasn't a particular person at fault -- it was baked into the system. When I opened Fairmount Peds in 2009, my first order of business was picking apart the system that caused that clinic to run so behind, and to rebuild a system that would run on time. Number one is to let patients have the right amount of time. If you know one patient will need 30 minutes and then next 10 minutes, one way to run the office is to give each 20 minutes and figure it will come out in the end. Well, it does come out in the end, but someone sat around for 10 minutes waiting to make that happen. We let patients choose the amount of time they need. It is not perfect, but most patients have a better sense of how long they need than we do. The next step is to only put one patient in each time slot. Many doctors' offices have two patients in each time slot. That's because they have a 50% no-show rate. For real -- half their patients do not show up or cancel at the last minute. Well, we charge $100 for canceling with less than 24 hours, or not showing up, and if patients no-show repeatedly, we ask them to leave the practice. Mean? I guess so. But we only put one patient in each time slot, and it works, since NO ONE no-shows! Finally, our staff knock on the door when our time is up. We got that idea from the therapists who are known for saying, "Well, our time is up..." Sometimes it's not possible to end at the time we are supposed to. If a patient is very sick or something scary is happening, we have to be flexible, and we are. One thing that helps these days is telehealth. If we didn't get to fully discuss the food allergy or the potty training or whatever else we wanted to discuss, there's the option to have a separate visit via telehealth, so we don't have to cram everything into one visit. That way, we docs and the patients can take the time we need, and not worry that the next kid is getting stir-crazy in the next exam room. I have heard some doctors say that patients don't mind waiting, since they get the time they need when it is finally their turn. I am sure that is true of some. But I know MY day is better when I don't keep people waiting, and I think their day is better, too.
Do not use contractions like Don't! The app does not accept them. The help page is: https://help.healow.com/
For more information, visit our New Patients page.
