sungoMar 13
I've had a lot of contact with the healthcare industry this week and it certainly shows in my attitude.
Show threadJosh Grosse6d ago

@sungo me too.

I did change insurance for 2026 and it's been a LOT better for me. Not just in funding care, it's a smaller insurer based in my state and communication and customer service has been excellent. There a small $30 snafu and three people are working on it and providing status updates.

Show threadsungo6d ago
@jggimi my biggest problem is that my illnesses cross specialties and the specialists are required to stay in their lane. so I'm looking at a medication that has implications for multiple specialties and I can't talk about the whole picture to anyone. I have to talk about each slice with each specialist and then piece the shit together myself.
Show threadMarc Mims
@sungo @jggimi My father was a cardiac transplant patient. The donor had Hepatitis-C which they didn't test for at the time. It was five years before they discovered Dad had Hep-C from the transplant. By then, because of the immunosuppressants, he had severe symptoms. After overhearing the head of the transplant team tell the (whatever specialist was handling his Hep-C) "I don't care if you kill him but he isn't going to die of cardiac symptoms on my program, so no, I won't moderate his immunosuppressants."

Dad immediately fire them both and moved his care to the Mayo Clinic. I travelled with him a couple of times for his annual workup. They had a week long schedule of tests and consults with various specialists who talked to each other. At the end of the week, the entire team of specialist met in a conference room to come up with a coordinated care plan that his PCP back home helped manage. It was a huge improvement in his quality of life.

All this to say this staying in your lane stuff is BS. It can be done better.
Mar 13 at 4:05pmWeb
Show threadsungo6d ago
@semifor @jggimi yeah we're debating as a household whether things have gotten complicated enough to go to some place like Mayo or Johns Hopkins
Show threadJosh Grosse6d ago

@sungo similar to @semifor, when my father was seeing many specialists, each wanting to only consider their own areas of expertise, his internal medicine physician coordinated all care. She was special, though. She'd been my doc previously, and I'd recommend her to my parents some years before.

As I age, I still have an internist, and also 7 or 8 specialists I see. As far as coordination goes, my rheumatologist always reaches out to the internist's clinic for recent lab results before ordering anything, every time I visit. He's the only one who appears to actively communicate with the internist about me. My cardiologist recently recommended a medication, and as I was seeing the internist later that day, he suggested I discuss it with the internist, as he didn't feel comfortable prescribing it without consultation. Everybody else? They do their own thing.