My experience with ROW Psychiatric is similar to some of the other reviews I've seen. I wish I had seen the reviews before starting therapy for my daughter and myself there. The sad truth is that mental healthcare in this country has been a mess for quite some time, but COVID absolutely made things much worse. We searched high and low for a practice that both saw patients in person and was in-network with our insurance company. ROW said, up front, that they did both. Like most therapists they require keeping a credit card on file. Fair enough. But the first red flag was our credit card being charged at odd times. We'd go into an appointment, but we'd be charged our $25 co-pay a day or two later. That became somewhat problematic as it was confusing keeping track of which charges were for which visit as we'd both have weekly visits. Ok, not the end of the world.
The real trouble began when all of a sudden we received a charge for $188 out of the blue. No call, no nothing from ROW. That was the start of a very long, stressful process of calling and emailing both with my insurance company and with ROW to get things straightened out. From the beginning they said they were in-network, yet all of a sudden we were getting charged as out of network. Throughout the whole mess, Jeanie (ROW's office assistant) was often rude, dismissive and flippant about what was going on. I couldn't get an answer from anyone on why all of our appointments were not being covered by insurance. It seemed as though Rosemary (the owner of the practice) and Jeanie couldn't care less about helping to straighten it out until I finally asked them to remove my credit card from their system. I received an email response to my request from Rosemary that was extremely unprofessional. Once they were no longer able to just charge my card for the claims my insurance company was denying, I finally received a phone call from Jeanie that their "billing guy" (she wouldn't give me his name) called the insurance company and it's all fixed now. It wasn't fixed.
Admittedly, not knowing what to do, my husband put a dispute onto the last unauthorized credit card charge and once ROW found that out, we got a call from Jeanie saying we weren't allowed back in until we called the credit card company to tell them there wasn't a problem anymore. She said it effected their merchant "rating". We complied, giving them the benefit of the doubt that it wasn't a problem on their end, had the dispute removed, and called Jeanie back only to hear both my daughter and I were still discharged. After all of this, I finally heard back from my insurance company who said, in the end, it was ROW's fault because they were supposed to be sending the bills to the insurance company's local branch and weren't so the insurance company thought they were out of network. It took me almost 6 weeks and many, many hours of calling and emailing to get that figured out.
I understand that billing issues happen. Insurance companies aren't easy to deal with, I get it. But the entire issue was HOW it was handled by ROW. Jeanie is almost singlehandedly responsible for how this entire ordeal went due to how rude she was. At no point did she ever acknowledge that it could be their fault. Rosemary deserves blame as well as the so called "leader" letting Jeanie do what she does to those seeking help with mental health. But all it took was communication. Working with instead of against us would have gone a long way. I do need to say, though, that Theresa was the only bright spot throughout all of this. She was a great therapist and was in no way to blame for what we went through. Unfortunately, the rest of the staff there was able to make this a bad experience. We were treated very unprofessionally and I highly recommend you stay away from ROW Psychiatric. read more
