Leaving HMO; Switching Insurance/Doctor
I have been part of an HMO for years but due to a job change, I need to switch to a new insurance plan. It will be my first time ever having a non-HMO or non-active duty military healthcare. A few questions:
1) How do I switch a prescription over? Basically, I have one fairly common (think blood pressure) medication. I refill every few months and will likely need it indefinitely in the future. So I get that I have to find a new pharmacy to get this medicine from, but do I use up the remaining script at the new pharmacy somehow, or does my current prescription "run out" when the current bottle is empty and I need to find a new primary care doctor to write a new script? My current bottle says I have 3 refills of 90 days worth each to use by some date in 2025 if that matters.
2) Regarding finding a new primary care physician. I am not someone who was always the most on top of regular physicals, but I am guessing the thing to do is use a source like Zocdoc to find in-network PCPs/internists and just go get a physical to they have a baseline for me? Do I just say like, "here are my ongoing issues and the one medicine I am on. What do you think?" and go from there? If it impacts the answer, I currently don't see any sort of specialist and have not needed to since a foot injury a number of years ago when I saw a podiatrist. So my only real "need" will be a new main doc and the prescription swap.
3) Do I need to try to get like a complete medical record from these past few years to bring to a new doctor? Or do only key things matter like vaccination record, most recent bloodwork, etc…? Not sure if it is comparable, but the last time I switched dentists, they did not seem to care too much about seeing all the old stuff and only wanted the most recent x-rays.
I welcome any general thoughts that you feel compelled to share. One thing I have noticed in general googling is that being in a large metro area seems to have a number of "competing" hospital systems or clinic groups and then what seem to be a number of independent/smaller one-off practices. I am guessing that does not matter for my purposes since in-network is in-network.
submitted by /u/Gaudilocks
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