Dr. Patrick Denard, a shoulder specialist at Southern Oregon Orthopedics, walks through how out-of-town patients get surgery. You submit imaging remotely, do a video consultation, come in the day before surgery, and handle follow-up visits by phone and video at two weeks, three months, and six months. Insurance costs are the same as for local patients.
Hi, I'm Patrick Denard.
I'm a shoulder specialist at Southern Oregon Orthopedics, and these are some common questions we have about travel for surgery. So in my practice, I have had the opportunity to take care of people from all over, and many of those people travel from quite far to have surgery or have an evaluation with me. I think people are really looking for 3 things that lead them to do that. Number 1 is getting accurate information. It's really important for them to feel like they have the right diagnosis. Number 2 is to have somebody who they really feel like cares about their outcome. Then I think the 3rd thing is technical skill. You want to be confident that you're going to get a good technical outcome, especially when it comes to surgery. So what the process looks like is somebody will send me their MRI or x-rays and then we'll get on the phone and have a discussion and really try to get to the bottom of it and find out what's going on first. If need be, we'll do a video conference as well. And then we have a face-to-face evaluation followed by surgery if that's needed. What we try to do is make that as simple as we can for people by making that so somebody comes in the day before, has an evaluation with me, and then I'll have the surgery the next day. So really it's pretty efficient in that manner. One of the big questions we get is follow-up. A lot of people will have the misconception that it's really hard because they have to keep coming back. The fortunate thing now is we have so much technology at our hands we can really do most of the follow-up remotely. In fact, in most cases, what we'll do is we'll talk on the phone at 2 weeks after procedure, and then at 3 months and 6 months, we'll get on and do a video conference, and we can really tell a lot about what's going on over that. So for many people, it's actually more convenient than going to the doctor where they have to wait, you know, in line and then wait for their physician an hour. In this case, they don't have to travel at all from the comfort of their own home. They get to have a face-to-face visit with me. Another question comes up is cost. Of course, that's an important thing for people to think about, and this is pretty straightforward because we accept almost all major insurances. So it's really no different than seeing a physician in some of these local areas in most cases. So thanks for listening. I hope that helps, and I look forward to possibly meeting you.
