Yesterday was my first day in the new office. It was a pleasure settling in. I am very grateful for Dr. Jasmine Teleki’s heroic efforts in finding the office and arranging the move! If you are coming to the office it should not be hard to find. It is on the West side of West El Camino Real in Mountain …
Mountain View Office
Today is the last day that Dr. Teleki and I will be in the downtown Mountain View office. Beginning next week we will be a few blocks away on El Camino Real. The new office will have easy parking at all times (many of you have noticed that finding parking in Mountain View near meal times is practically impossible) and …
Communication
I love email. Really. It has allowed me to communicate much more effectively with my patients. And the ability to have that kind of relationship with the people we see is very important to me. However, I have recently been feeling overwhelmed by email communication. I am also aware that email is not a secure way of discussing confidential information. Email considerations. If you are a …
Collaboration with Health Professionals
After a number of traded phone messages and emails, a psychologist we have been trying to talk to about a mutual patient, sent an email: “Unfortunately, our schedules are a complete mis-match.” Earlier this week we finally managed to talk to a naturopathic physician about another mutual patient, after three weeks of traded phone messages with her secretary. Good communication with …
Pre visit Questionnaire
For more than a year we’ve been sending out reminders about future appointments along with a link to a pre-visit survey form. The idea for doing this originally came from new documentation requirements that were embedded in a revision of the standard billing codes for psychiatry a couple of years ago. We realize that the new documentation requirements would take …
Frequency of Visits
The frequency of visits to the clinic can be a source of considerable irritation. Why do we recommend that people come in once a week, or once every two weeks, or once a month, or less often? A wonderful young man I have been seeing for several years got very angry when I replied to his request to reschedule his appointment …
Liz Ren – Welcome
I’m very excited to announce that a new psychiatric and mental health nurse practitioner, Liz Ren, will be joining our staff in April. I think you can get a sense of her enthusiasm and perhaps her intelligence and excellent qualifications from the paragraphs that she wrote for me about why she is excited to be joining Gateway… “Gateway is the …
Fee Changes
It is time to update our fee list. The last time we revised our fees was in November of 2013. In preparation for this task we reviewed data on health care costs in the Bay Area from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and we compared our fees to average fees in San Francisco for the same services (CPT codes) using …
Online Office
We don’t exactly have a robot like Siri who can answer all your questions and do all your tasks online. But we have tried to put together a list of ways of getting information and taking care of routine tasks that cuts down the number of steps it takes if you just try to trade voicemails, or even emails with …
Welcome New Staff
I’m very pleased to welcome a new clinician to Gateway Psychiatric. Kate Melino is a psychiatric and mental health nurse practitioner who is joining us as our new substance use expert. Kate received her Bachelor of Science (with honors) in nursing from the University of Toronto, and her Master of Science (Nurse Practitioner) from UCSF. Since graduating from UCSF she’s …