I seldom leave reviews, especially for professional practices, but my experience with Columbia Podiatry was so bad that I felt I should warn others.
The office visit itself, with Dr. Sanders, went just fine. I had plantar fasciitis and also had been told by the pedicurist that I had toenail fungus. Dr. Sanders showed me stretches to do to help alleviate the plantar fasciits and also recommended some arch supports. They are simple hard inserts made of something that looks like fiberglass that go into your shoe. For the other problem he recommended a prescription. This required that I have blood work done before beginning the prescription. I mentioned to the doctor that I had just had routine blood work done the prior week at my regular doctor's office and he said that was great, we could use those results. When I checked out the inserts cost me $75 in addition to the $60 co-pay I paid. They said the cost of the inserts was just that, $75. No further cost was ever mentioned. I filed out the paperwork that the office was to fax to my doctor's office, which is incidentally essentially just across the parking lot from this podiatrist's office. They said they would call in my prescription as soon as they got the blood work results from my doctor.
After two weeks the Rx had not been called in, so I phoned Columbia Podiatry. To make a long story short, I called the following week as well, but needed to call when someone familiar with my chart was there. Three weeks after my appointment I finally got someone who could look at my chart, but she said my doctor's office didn't seem to have sent the necessary paperwork. She said they would attempt get it and call in my Rx. One week and several phone calls later, I got a message from someone in the office, I'll call her Betty. When I tried to return her call, the woman who said she had recently become Dr. Sanders assistant told me that there was no way I got the message I claimed to have gotten from Betty because Betty would not have known about my case, since she is not the doctor's assistant. Long story short, after waiting one month I was incredibly impatient. They never took responsibility for not contacting my doctor a second or third time to try to get the paperwork, they just blamed my doctor's office for not sending it.
Eventually they did get the blood work from my doctor, but when I realized that I would have to have blood work done every few weeks and report back through those girls at Columbia Podiatry in order to take the full prescription, I opted out all together. I simply don't want to go back to that office. My impression is that the staff does not care, and they were not professional or courteous to me as a patient.
Today I got a statement from my insurance company that said I owe an additional $200 for the inserts I got that day. I called the podiatrists office 's ask why they never mentioned that the inserts cost $275! She said that I don't have to pay the extra $200, they just bill that amount to my insurance company to see if they'll get paid. Had I known that the cost of the little pieces of fiberglass (which I have not been able to use much, as they cause my feet to hurt even more than the original problem) was $275 I would never have gotten them.
This experience certainly could have been worse, but it left a very bad taste in my mouth. I feel that doctors and their staff owe their patients at least a measure of courtesy and concern, and I don't feel that I got that at all from the staff at Columbia Podiatry. In addition, for the practice to bill my insurance company an additional $200 just to see if they would be able to collect seems shabby to me. read more
