In Office and Internet Consultations
DR. SPENCER COCHRAN: Rhinoplasty consultations in our practice take approximately one hour. The consultations begin with the patients undergoing photographs. The patients will then meet with the doctors and then we’ll sit down together and analyze those photographs. The photographs allow us also to develop a surgical plan and to define the goals and propose changes to surgery.
After meeting with the doctors then the patients will meet with the nurses and the nurses will review postoperative instructions and walk them through each stage of the recovery process. The patients will then meet with a patient coordinator who will talk with the patients about scheduling and the cost of surgery.
DR. JACK P. GUNTER: Many of our patients come from outside the Dallas, Fort Worth area and to better serve these patients we developed an internet consultation. What the patient has to do is to fill out a medical history and say what they think is wrong with their nose and if they have any breathing problems and get six standardized photographs and send these in by email. And from this we can pretty well tell whether a patient is going to be a good candidate or not.
And if we think the patient is a good candidate, what we do is to send the patient back an email telling the candidate the goal for the surgeries and giving them the approximate cost of the surgery and the anesthesia and the hospital. If the patient wants to proceed they must make a trip to Dallas for a personal consultation so that we can make certain that our diagnosis is correct. If the patient is not a good candidate, well then we write them back and tell them that and it saves them a trip to Dallas. If you’re interested in an internet consultation you can look up the Internet Consultation page on our website and see what we’re talking about.
