This is a fourth post to update our Medicare status. It is an update of the post from 2017. Provider Status and Volunteer Teaching at UCSF As of October 2015, Dr. Forster is no longer “opted out” from Medicare. This change was necessary for him to continue to serve as a volunteer clinical faculty member supervising residents in the Bipolar …
Mountain View Psychiatrist First Day
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 …
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 …
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 …
What happened to the website?
Some of you may have gone to our website this past weekend and been surprised to learn that the site was “dangerous.” Although some of the ideas that we talk about here might be viewed that way, the reason this happened had to do with the challenges of maintaining SSL encryption and the highest level of security. Basically, for 3 …
Bipolar Depression Update
On Thursday at noon Dr. Peter Forster, our clinical director, will be giving a presentation to the UCSF Department of Psychiatry Mood Disorder Grand Rounds on the topic of “Bipolar Depression: An Update.” He will be reviewing the recent literature on new treatment options and will summarize some of the talk findings in a future blog post.
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 …
New Staff
I am pleased to welcome a young woman, Hershe Gesmundo to this site. She is going to be working with me on a number of administrative projects related to this site, and to the companion site – MoodSurfing.com. Hershe had this to say about herself – Hershe Gesmundo is a development practitioner who specializes in the areas of project management, …