Courtney Jean

Review of Edward M.Kennedy Community Hea...

I was wary about calling, due to the reviews about...

I was wary about calling, due to the reviews about phone staff, and I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt. I was looking into counseling services so I called the number and chose the option for behavioral health. The woman I spoke to said I needed to be registered as a medical patient with a PCP there to receive BH services, which is fine because I need to find a new PCP anyway so figured I'd kill two birds with one stone. I was redirected to the new patient registration and waited on hold for about 30 minutes (I know how crazy practices are so I wasn't even going to complain about that, until everything else transpired)

The woman I spoke to was kind but seemed very uninformed and spoke to me as if everything she was saying made perfect sense. Here's what she told me:
a) I would need to call my insurance myself and have them contact EMK to confirm they would cover me there, and I needed to do this before they would move forward with my registration. I told her I had already confirmed with my insurance that they covered EMK services and I had all of my plan info ready for her to put into the system. She refused because...
b) While they are "technically" accepting new patients, they are only able to put them on a waiting list, and that I would have to have my name put on the waiting list and wait for a registration person to call me back and check my insurance.

So basically, they want to accept new patients but only to a waiting list and only if they can prove on their own that their insurance will cover services, because the people answering the line to register new patients don't actually have the ability to register new patients in their actual computer system.

If you don't have the time, staffing, or resources to register new patients WHEN they call to register, stop saying you're accepting new patients and save people the time. Definitely not a good first impression at all, which is sad seeing as this location is close to where I live and I could have utilized multiple services/departments there.