Dr. Siram may be excellent an excellent surgeon, but how Summit runs its practice has, for me, been…read moreso frustrating that I can't recommend it. I don't think its 4.9 rating is deserved whatsover given what I dealt with.
Reaching anyone is hard. The website doesn't list a main phone number; the numbers are buried in a "staff directory" drop-down. When you call, you get a high-call-volume message and waits of 15 to 40 minutes. One Friday I called at 3:00 p.m. and waited a full hour, until the office closed at 4:00, without ever reaching a person. On weekends, the phone system won't let you into any menu option, so you have to wait until Monday morning.
Prescription refills are worse. The patient portal has no refill-request function, and my portal messages about refills (I have proof of three separate attempts, with follow-ups) were never answered. A refill can be requested by phone, but only through option #4 on the phone menu, which nobody would find intuitively. I left that message, with all the required details, on Thursday, Oct. 22, with two pain pills left, which meant my last pill would be Saturday, Oct. 24. As of Tuesday, Oct. 27, I still haven't heard back. An earlier refill message was never acknowledged either.
The portal also had problems. By my count, Summit has only five locations: an office in Bethesda, an office at Foxhall in D.C., and three physical therapy facilities in Bethesda, Foxhall and Foggy Bottom. Yet until I raised it with a secretary earlier this year, I couldn't message my provider's team at all. The choices that came up included offices in Darnestown, Frederick and elsewhere in Western Maryland, but not Bethesda. The secretary told me to type "27" in the box to make the Bethesda office appear. No patient could be expected to guess that. It was fixed not long afterward.
My care with Dr. Siram, whom I first saw in February for knee arthritis, raised further concerns. After a cortisone injection, I asked through the portal about a gel injection. The reply said only that I would have to come in for an evaluation. When I did, I was told I would have to wait six months, and a second staff member confirmed that by phone. At my June 12 visit, Dr. Siram told me the wait was really about insurance coverage, not a medical requirement. That visit was scheduled for 11:15 a.m. I arrived on time and was not seen until about 12:45. Only at 12:10 p.m. did front-desk staff tell me "he was running 15 minutes late." As a result, I missed an important 1:00 p.m. appointment elsewhere in Bethesda, and the doctor's apology for an 1.5 hour wait was half-hearted. When I dared to email him about thist, his reply was, in part, the snarkiest email I have ever received from a well-regarded professional. He wrote that my health was "a two way street" and that it was "incumbent upon [me] to ask questions." He said my own curiosity about treatment was "paper thin." I believe it is the doctor, with vastly superior knowledge, who should do the probing and informing after a condition has persisted. I would gladly share that email with the practice's management.
Then came calls and texts over about three months from an unfamiliar Minnesota number saying a prescription was ready. The caller would not identify herself, the drug, or the pharmacy, and the texts urged me to call an 800 number or lose the prescription. It looked like a scam, and when the texts did not stop, it became bothersome. Eventually a caller told me the drug was "a gel something." I had never agreed to a gel injection, and none was ever prescribed for me Summit as far as I knew. I called Summit, spoke with a "Dan," who apologized and said he would fix the problem. Still another text came ten days after my first call to Dan; it was only after my second call to Dan that the text messages finally stopped.
The medical expertise at Summit may be strong, but unreachable phones, unanswered refill requests, long unannounced delays, and confusing communications make getting care here needlessly difficult. In my view, going to Summit Orthopedics is a mistake.
