Welcome to Fort Myers Family Medicine

 

The physicians and staff at Fort Myers Family Medicine appreciate the opportunity to provide your medical services. We want to strengthen communication between our office and you, our patients. Our staff is fluent in English, Spanish, French, Tagalog and American Sign Language! We plan to introduce you to our office staff and the new services we are offering so we can better serve your health care needs. You are our reason for being here and we want you to know just how important you are!

 

CyberClinic / Patient Portal

Request prescriptions, appointments, have a virtual visit with the doctor and more!

(239) 433-4014
Fax (239) 481-6247 On-site clinic:
9:00AM - 5:00PM (Monday-Friday)

When a medical office files medicare, private insurance, health savings accounts, or high-deductible insurance claims, the following expenses are incurred:

The development, implementation and delivery of a comprehensive, high quality, and yet affordable healthcare product requires extremely complex data collection, intense risk assessment and actuarial/statistical analysis that defies comprehension by the average person. Only with this data collection can insurance companies calculate risk and provide healthcare coverage for catastrophic illness as well as preventative care and treatment of minor health problems, The trade-off between data collection cost and the benefit of comprehensive health care should not be construed as an issue of discussion here. The following paragraphs merely describes the rationale used at Fort Myers Family Medicine to arrive at the Elective Full-Pay cost out.

 

When a medical office files medicare, private insurance, health savings accounts, or high-deductible insurance claims, the following expenses are incurred:

1. Personnel IE; billing manager, billing claims data entry, CPT coder and collections manager. Usually services (salaries and benefits) of three to five different employees in a small-to medium sized medical office
2. Electronic claims management programs (billing software), DSL communication lines, "electronic clearing houses", computer hardware, computer software and hardware maintenance by IT (Information systems) technician support, computer and software training and updates for employees.
3. Office supplies (envelopes, stationary, printing supplies, ink), postage, postage meter lease, copy machines  (with maintenance, leases and charges for copy overages), HCFA (government approved) forms.
4. Time deterioration/decay of money due to A/R (accounts receivable) cycle time. For example the turn around time for a filed claim may be as short as two weeks (seldom), or as long as six months. A claim of $250.00 for services today that doesn't get paid for 60-90 days represents a loss of the use of that money without interest for 2-3 months. Immediate use and possession of $200.00 paid now at time of service may be more valuable/desirable than waiting six months for $250.00 (and the certainty that this service has indeed been compensated.)
5. Legal and consulting fees for contract review and negotiations.

When a patient has contracted with a "High-Deductible" insurance plan or a "Health Savings Account", to receive credit from the insurance company for that payment, the patient/medical office still incurs the administrative overhead expenses by utilizing expense categories # 1, 2, 3, and #5. When their deductibles are met and all payments (for contractually covered services) are the obligation of the insurer, then expense categories # 1, 2, 3, 4, and #5 are required for the medical office to collect it's payments for services.

BY Contrast, when an Elective Full-Pay patient pays either by cash, or credit card in full, at the time of service, expense categories #1 is 95% eliminated, #2 is 95% eliminated, #3 is totally eliminated, #4 is totally eliminated, # 5 is totally eliminated.
If payment in full is not possible, then a rate increase for the remaining debt is necessary as that debt will require utilization of the above expense categories.

What Fort Myers Family Medicine intends to do is bill the patients only for the practice costs they actually utilize, provide Transparency to assist the public with the transition to consumer-driven health care reform, and to avoid "cost-shifting".