**TLDR: If you want to make an appointment in a timely manner, choose a different facility. This is especially true if you have a PPO/ POS plan - you can decide where to go and what provider you want, so pick elsewhere.**
As mentioned in previous reviews, their customer service is outsourced to a call center overseas. Are you a new patient? Want to make an appointment? Well, you have to speak with someone who isn't American to see a doctor in America.
As you can imagine, outsourcing customer service creates a lot of issues. Foremost is that there seems to be a lot lost in translation, so there are misunderstandings that do not need to happen. Want to see a specific doctor? Well, the call center employees will either unintentionally not understand or intentionally pretend not to hear you. I live in Pleasanton and requested to see a specific doctor at the Pleasanton office. The customer service rep insisted that I see a different doctor in a different city.
I ultimately had to go to the office in person to make an appointment, which should not be necessary. I should have been able to make an appointment in a timely manner over the phone. I want to highlight that there's no way to call the office directly, no way to circumvent the call center as a new patient.
Perhaps most egregious is that I have an Aetna PPO plan (list here https://www.aetna.com/health-insurance-plans/ppo.html). When I log into my member portal, it is clear that both Tri-Valley Ortho and the doctor I requested are in-network. Both the call center rep and the receptionist in the office told me that I was out-of-network and needed to pay expenses for the appointment out-of-pocket. I had to spend more time calling Aetna's health concierge to [a] confirm that my plan is a PPO plan, and [b] confirm that both Tri-Valley Ortho and the doctor I requested are in-network. As the patient, I should not have been responsible for insurance verification. Furthermore, my Aetna concierge suggested that Tri-Valley Ortho would have double-dipped if I had gone to my appointment - they would have charged both me and my insurance for the visit.
I spoke to the office manager, Tinisha (sp?), over the phone concerning my issues with [1] the call center experience, and [2] the office's inability to recognize that my insurance is a PPO plan. While she stated that she would investigate my interaction with the call center, from the history we can piece together from the recent reviews, it seems that this is a long-standing problem. When I mentioned that my Aetna concierge said that my plan is a PPO plan and that this practice is in-network, all she said was "good". No apology for making me do the job of this office in insurance benefits verification.
I chose this practice because I wanted to see either Dr. Julie Long or Dr. Steven Liu based on their good reviews. At the end of the day, no matter how good a doctor is, no patient who can choose his/her provider will choose to go through hoops with difficult office staff. I will be going to a different doctor at a different practice with more competent and pleasant office staff, right across the street.
Tri-Valley Orthopedic Specialists is part of Bass Medical Group, which is "a large physician owned, physician directed, and patient centered organization" per LinkedIn. To the physicians who own and direct this organization: Do you find it acceptable for your office staff to treat patients poorly?
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