August 14, 2025

What Kind of Visit Should we Have Today?

Took Mom to her AMAZING primary care physician today to an appointment that we scheduled months and months ago. These days you cannot get in with her unless she happens to be on the office when you are super sick and you get one of her sick visits or unless you book way in advance. We typically see a PA these days and many of them are fantastic, but they are not her primary provider who she started with after moving to the area and has known her medical history for the last 3 plus years.

So we are about to have one of our favorite docs enter the room after Mom stood on the scale (amazed by the amount she has lost due to multiple surgeries and being on a liquid diet for months) and got her height measured (confirming she is shrinking)… and the nurse says that this is scheduled as an annual Medicare Wellness visit and she has noticed that Mom has had a lot going on here and does she want to switch it to some other type of visit.

Long pause as neither Mom nor I knew how to respond to this, wondering to ourselves what is the difference between an annual Medicare Wellness visit and whatever other option the visit would be coded as? Then I asked if she is required to have that Medicare Annual Wellness visit and the nurse said no and she also specified that if we chose the Medicare Annual Wellness visit that the doc can only talk about the topics on a list that Medicare says the doctor should discuss. So of course we chose the other option, though we don’t really know what that other option is in the world of billing and coding.

But we ended up with a beautifully thorough, normal session with one of our favorite docs who knows Mom well and we hope the bill isn’t out of the ordinary.

Never had that question before.