Office Policy

Services Provided

Alamo Asthma & Associates P.A. is a subspecialty clinic providing medical consultations. Our goal is to thoroughly evaluate your allergy, asthma and immunology-related problems and provide our recommendations to you and your primary care physician. Following your evaluation, you will be provided with a treatment plan which typically addresses anticipated disease flares (Available on our EMR portal). If your medical problems are not responding to our treatment you should contact us as soon as possible.

The partnership that we will establish with your primary care physician is key in providing you with optimal medical care. Our office does not provide urgent care services unless a scheduled appointment slot is available. *We cannot accommodate “work-in” or “walk-in” patients and still provide high quality care to our scheduled patients. In addition, we do not admit patients to hospitals. For these reasons, we highly recommend that you establish a relationship with a Primary Care Physician (PCP) to provide you with the services not available at our office. A primary care physician can also perform your needed routine health maintenance monitoring. If you do not have a primary care physician, please select one from your insurance providers list ASAP or search on-line for well-reviewed Physicians. After each office visit, we will forward our notes and any labs or other reports to your PCP. If you have an emergency problem, you should call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room—do not waste time attempting to contact any physician by phone. Severe asthma or serious allergic reactions should always be seen in an emergency room and not in a physician’s office.

Appointment Scheduling

Appointments will be scheduled during office business hours only. By not accepting “walk-ins”, we are better able to serve you in a timely manner when you arrive for your scheduled appointment. Our goal is to see you within 30 minutes of your arrival. We expect you to arrive 15 minutes before your scheduled appointment so that you can complete the required paperwork (Expect traffic problems on 1604 and Stone Oak Pkwy). To expedite your check-in, your Patient registration / Insurance information can be completed prior to your arrival by printing the required forms online at www.AlamoAsthma.Com (see “Pre-Registration” tab). If you arrive more than 15 minutes after your appointed time, you are actually 30 minutes late and if you were seen late, we would not be able to see the patients who follow you in their scheduled time slots. *Arriving on time will greatly affect your satisfaction with our services and will prevent other patients from being inappropriately inconvenienced. *Our office policy prohibits our staff from scheduling more than one family member on any single day without a $60.00 per person deposit.

Appointment Cancellations

When you are scheduled for an appointment, just like with a hotel reservation, that time slot is made unavailable to any other person. Unlike many other Physicians, we do not overbook or double book appointments. This is our commitment to you to help ensure that you are seen on time and receive the utmost in personal attention. Scheduling an appointment is also a commitment to us that you will use our resources. If you do not show up as planned, we have lost the opportunity to provide our services to another patient. Patient “No Shows” are why most other physicians overbook appointments to avoid having unused “open” appointment slots, and why you must often wait for hours to be seen in other practices. To help us avoid resorting to this practice, you must cancel any appointment at least 24-hours in advance. For anyone who is cancelled by us for not arriving on time, or for “no shows”, regardless of the reason, a $60.00 deposit will be required before you are allowed to re-schedule. We reserve the right to terminate our doctor-patient relationship with anyone who is abusing appointments (more than two no-shows). An appointment will not be necessary to receive allergy shots or any immunization at our clinic. All shots are administered for walk-ins on a first-come, first-served basis.

* Due to the small size of our Exam rooms, the local San Antonio Fire Safety Codes limit our room occupancy to a maximum of 4 total persons (Typically, the Physician, a child and 2 parents). *If your child is scheduled for an evaluation, please do not bring other young children with you if you feel that they could not sit unmonitored in our waiting room.

Prescription Refills

To meet the appropriate community standards of care, we will provide refills is you have been seen by us within the past 12 months. For example, if you were seen 6-months ago, we can provide you with an additional 6-months supply of medications, but you will be expected to schedule a follow up appointment within the next 6 months. Refills will typically be called-in or faxed into the pharmacy within 24hrs of a request. *Call for refills well before you run out. Refills can be requested only during office hours. (Please do not call us after hours for refills.)

Phone Calls to Speak With Your Doctor

In order to avoid interruptions in our scheduled patient care, phone calls will typically be returned at the end of each day. When you leave a message, please identify the patient’s name and their birthday and provide all phone numbers where you can be reached at the time you called, and any other number where you may be reached later that day. *To provide you with medications, we may need your pharmacy phone number as well. If your voicemail greeting does not state your name, we cannot leave medically-related information for you.

Please do not call expecting your doctor to treat a new medical problem over the phone. Any symptom that arises more than a week after an office visit, and is not directly-related to the treatment we provided, is considered a “new” medical problem. It is not possible for us to thoroughly evaluate a new medical problem without the ability to perform a physical exam. “Telephone Medicine” is an unsafe practice that does not meet the Texas Medical Board’s expectation for delivery of appropriate Medical Care and puts you at risk for misdiagnosis and sub-optimal treatment.

Financial Policy

Alamo Asthma & Allergy has contracted with most regional and national insurance plans. We do not typically establish payment plans but will accept personal checks, Debit Cards, MasterCard, Discovery, American Express and Visa. At your office visit, you will be required to pay all required Medical Insurance co-pays and deductibles. *All physicians who contract with Medical Insurance Companies are obligated to collect these fees. Any patient who requests to be seen or treated in our office without a prior authorization (if this is required by your insurance), will be responsible for the full charge of the visit. It is the patient’s responsibility to obtain any required prior-authorization from their Primary Care Physician before calling for an appointment. Our staff will not contact your Primary Care Physician to request a referral. In addition, it is your responsibility to understand your insurance benefits and costs for medical care; our staff cannot determine your benefits for you. At your request we will provide you with an estimate of the anticipated office charges (before you are evaluated or any testing is done). If you have a large deductible that is unlikely to be met for the year, it may be wise to consider taking advantage of our “cash paid” discount (50% off our usual billed charges). Paying “out-of-pocket” may benefit patients who typically never reach their large yearly deductibles or those who are uninsured. We also cannot determine what testing will be approved or covered by your insurance carrier; you are responsible for any cost of testing that we feel is relevant to your care however; Even if we think a test is necessary or important for your care, you have the right to refuse any testing.

Radiology & Laboratory Services

We do not draw blood or perform x-rays at our office

If your insurance company has negotiated discounts with any specific Pharmacy, Lab or X-ray service facility, please notify our staff of this situation. It is your responsibility to understand your insurance benefits and discounted referral contracts they have and you must report to us any preferred client services if you wish to receive the maximum available cost savings. If you do not know your benefits, you should contact your insurance provider’s customer services for this information before obtaining any potentially high cost services such as Labs or CAT scans. If you pre-identify your preferred lab testing company or radiology center location, we can almost always modify our testing requests to get you the best price for these services.

Periodic Evaluations of Our Medical Care

As a way of improving our services and contributing to our field of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, we periodically review the outcomes of our medical care. When we monitor our effectiveness, we may choose to share these results with other physicians by presenting this information at Medical Meetings, or publishing this information in Medical Journals. If your medical information is used for this purpose, no specific identifying information about you would ever be released. We do not participate in any “for-profit” medical or drug studies.

Vacation / Office Closure Policy

Our anticipated office closure dates are published on-line at www.AlamoAsthma.com. When our office is closed, please address all medically related issues to your PCP. Lab reports that arrive at our office while we are on vacation will be discussed with you after our return. If necessary, in our absence, your PCP can request a copy of these labs (from the Testing Centers). If you do not have a PCP, for minor routine urgent care issues we recommend CVS “Minute Clinics”. Any serious or potentially life-threatening conditions such as acute asthma or anaphylaxis should only be seen in an Emergency Room.

Policy for Fevers

Our office provides care for many patients who have abnormal (compromised) immune systems. When you sit in our waiting room, you may be sitting next to one of these persons. If they contract influenza or other illnesses, they are likely to suffer more severely than persons with normal immune systems. For this reason, it is our policy to keep our office free from easily transmitted illnesses as a way to protect these patients. Fevers are typically caused by viral infections and rarely if ever by sinus infections. Fever with a cough makes viral transmission even more likely. If you have either fever alone (Temp > 100.5) or cough with fever, we ask that you first seek urgent care from your Primary Care Physician. If you have only a bacterial sinus infection, you should not have a fever > 100.5.

BEFORE YOU ARRIVE: If you are requesting allergy skin testing, be sure that all antihistamine use has been discontinued for at least one week. If you are not sure if you are taking an antihistamine medication, consult your pharmacist. For skin testing, you do not need to stop nasal steroid sprays, Singulair or any inhaled Asthma Medications. *Azelastine nose spray (Astelin / Dymista) is an antihistamine. Patients with frequent hives should not stop antihistamine use. Please bring a completed “Patient Information Form” and a signed “Office Policy” (This form) with you to your appointment.

DIRECTIONS TO THE OFFICE: Traffic on both Rt. 1604 and Rt. 281 into the Stone Oak area can be very heavy; please consider extra time allotment for this issue. Stone Oak Parkway is located on the North-side of Loop 1604 about mid-way between the exits for Blanco Road and Hwy 281. Our office is located on Gallery Circle, approximately 0.3 miles north of 1604. (Gallery Circle is the 2nd right-hand turn off Stone Oak Pkwy). 115 Gallery Circle is the building at the far end of the cul-de-sac and our name is on the top of the building. Suite 200 is on the 2nd floor.

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Asthma & Allergy Associates
115 Gallery Circle
Suite 200
San Antonio, TX 78258
(Stone Oak MRI/Urgent Care Bldg.)
Tel: 210.499.0033
Fax: 210.404.0926
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