New patients

Welcome to Scituate Pediatrics. We are currently accepting new patients both newborns and transfers of older children. Our office hours & phone numbers, and directions to the office are available if you click the appropriate link or visit us via the Healthcare South practice page. You must contact your insurance carrier and change your child's primary care physician if required by your plan to have one.

When you visit us in person for the first time, you will be asked to complete a patient registration form. You can print a copy of this form and complete it before coming in to save time for both you and us. In addition to the patient registration form, you will be asked to present your insurance card at each visit with the appropriate co-pay. It may be an inconvenience for you, and it certainly is time consuming for us, but we are required by each and every insurance company to have a current copy of your card before we can legally bill for any service. The insurance companies collectively save over five percent of their charges each year due to the complexities of submitting charges correctly. We cannot contribute to their savings and still provide you with the service to which you're entitled. Please bring your card to each and every visit.

To be able to view and download .pdf files, like the patient registration form above, just click on the Adobe Acrobat Reader icon.

Well child visits
We like to see every newborn two to three days following the discharge of mother and baby from the hospital. These visits are usually scheduled with one of our nurse practitioners or physician assistants. During that visit, we will review the birth history, feeding and sleeping issues, ensure that the baby has started to regain some of his or her birth weight, and answer any questions that new parents may have. Most babies will have received their first Hepatitis B immunization in the hospital, but if they haven't we will give it at this visit; otherwise there are no shots the first time around.

Following this first visit, we see babies at one, two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve, fifteen, eighteen months, two years, and then at each subsequent birthday until the child leave the practice, usually when they graduate from college. The schedule of immunizations is linked in a .pdf file.

At each well visit, we review feeding, elimination, sleeping, behavioral, developmental, emotional, safety, and anticipatory guidance issues. There is always adequate time for all your questions, so we ask that you please write them down for completeness sake. With older children, we, typically, examine the child first alone in the exam room and then talk to a parent/guardian separately in our consult room. The decision as to the age at which that occurs is arrived at collectively with the parent, child and examiner.

Sick child visits
We begin answering the phones at 8:30 a.m. We will schedule acute care visits on the same day from nine o'clock until five o'clock. If you call before five o'clock you will be seen the same day, if necessary. We make every effort to make sure that if your child has a problem we will address it as rapidly as possible. On the weekend, we are either in the office (almost every Saturday morning and half of the Sundays), or one of our colleagues who is cross covering will be in their office seeing patients on an urgent care basis. If you need to be seen on the weekend, please call our office as early in the day as possible and you will be routed to the appropriate on call physician. Please do not address minor or chronic (i.e. several months) issues on a weekend if at all possible. There are limitations in services available on weekends and covering physicians are not able to manage complex, chronic conditions in an efficient manner on weekends. Please plan ahead.

After hours phone calls
All of us who are on call carry a pager. If paged, we will return each emergent call within ten minutes if you identify the call as an emergency. For urgent calls, we will call back within the hour. For routine calls, please call us during office hours, if possible, so that we have the benefit of your office chart and the availability of ancillary facilities.

Referrals
For each referral, you must contact our office at least one week before the referral appointment to give us enough time to review the request and contact you beforehand, if necessary. No referral will be authorized if it originates with a family's failure to contact us first to discuss the problem. No referral will be authorized if we are not given the one-week's lead-time.

Insurance subtleties
Each insurance company has a different policy regarding referrals based on the products they sell you or your employers. In general, there are three major types of coverage: HMO coverage, PPO coverage, and general Indemnity coverage. The HMO coverage is the least expensive and has the tightest restrictions. It is marketed to the subscribers as allowing each patient access to the network wide group of physicians. Unfortunately for us, your physicians, we cannot be part of their primary care network unless we agree to accept part of the risk involved in care for you. In simple terms, if the cost of your medical care exceeds the budget the insurance company has set, the physician providers must make up the shortfall. We the physicians end up paying for your referrals. Each of us is ethically bound to provide the single best care we can provide for each patient we care for. We recognize this responsibility and take it very seriously; however, if we are responsible for each referral, we need to be part of each referral request. This may seem onerous and impractical to you, and it certainly is cumbersome for us, but it is absolutely necessary. We have contacted each of our specialist colleagues about this situation. They will require that you have a referral in hand before they provide specialty care.

For the other options offered by your insurance carrier, the referral restrictions may be less onerous. For a PPO product, you may not need a referral as long as the specialist is with your plan's specified network; for an Indemnity product you may not need a referral at all. It is ultimately your responsibility to determine the specific requirements and restrictions of your plan; as much as we can, we will help you with this responsibility, recognizing that there are a multitude of insurance carriers and products that we have to deal with.