Orchard Health Care nursing and admin staff, as well as Dr. Kanner, will be able to be more effective care coordinators and advocates on your behalf if you remember some of these practical details:
- Emergencies: If you are acutely ill or injured and need to go to an emergency room, please be sure you call our main number (781) 684-0600 to leave a message if not to talk to Dr. Kanner or the physician on call. We have an answering service for that purpose.
- We do not necessarily get notified by emergency rooms or hospitals that you are there, being treated, or even admitted. We should, but we don’t. Do not be shy. Call.
- Whitelist orchardhealthcare.net domain: Our mass office email to members in September was rejected by security filters on many of your email accounts, especially gmail.com, Comcast.net, yahoo.com, and a few others. Please mark our domain and email accounts as “safe” or “not junk” on your email spam filters.
- Clinical emails: Please send any clinically related email to nurse@orchardhealthcare.net with a copy to drkanner@orchardhealthcare.net if needed. Jean and Lindsay, as you know, are highly competent professionals. They are also Dr. Kanner’s backstops, so that they help him answer the myriad emails he gets daily from members. If your concern is truly private, then of course email him alone. He should respond within 24 hours, but if not, please send it again. Dr. Kanner admits to being fallible and occasionally overwashed by the mail. That’s why he prefers to have the nurses in the loop. All med refill requests should go to the nurses alone.
- Specialists: If you make your own appointments with a consulting physician, please let our office know in a timely fashion. That way we can be sure the referral is made (if one is needed) and that appropriate records are sent to that consultant, as well as to alert our staff to check on the results of the consultation and get a report for Dr. Kanner to review.
- Test Reports: You should hear back from us about the results of any test that we know about. If you haven’t heard, please email nurse@orchardhealthcare.net or do the old-fashioned thing and call (781) 684-0600 and ask. We have very good office procedures to check on all patient tests, but there are just so many ways things can go awry, and we still have not achieved perfection. So if you haven’t heard in a timely fashion, contact us.
- Medications: Please know your own medications (if any) and check them carefully against new prescriptions and medication lists we may give you. This is especially important if you see another physician who changes any of your meds. We have to know them accurately to give you proper guidance and for your safety. The nurses will check your meds each visit for that reason. Doctors are not all on the same clinical data systems, and won’t be in the foreseeable future.
- Med Refills: If somehow you are running out of a continuing medication, please do not wait until Friday at 3:50 p.m. to contact us. We normally refill all meds at regular appointments to avoid unscheduled urgent shortages. Remember to get those prescription renewals into your pharmacy, local or send-away. If a shortage nevertheless occurs, please call earlier in the day when possible and allow several hours for us to verify your request and implement it carefully. The majority of pharmacy calls for refills are for drugs we refilled for patients at prior appointments. And pharmacies are notorious for saying “the doctor didn’t call” when we did.
