The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) maintains responsibility for determining the philosophy, content and scope of family medicine, and for establishing the definition of "family medicine" and "family physician.
A physician can be called a family medicine specialist by maintaining eligibility requirements for active membership in the AAFP. They usually receive their training in an approved family medicine residency program accredited through the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). Board certification of family physicians is the responsibility of the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM).
Dr. Dorothea Jacobsen, Dr. Linsey Haden, Dr Daniel Owen, Dr Jenna Cook, Dr Christine Keim, and Dr Alisa Nollendorfs are currently able to take new patients for most types of insurance. All physicians will accept the spouse and children of their current patients.
A patient centered medical home (PCMH) is a term used to define a medical practice which has declared that they will be a patient’s primary care team, pulling together all of a patient’s needs and care necessities into one place. There are five fundamental components to a PCMH.
SERPA stands for South East Rural Physician Alliance. This is an ACO, or Accountable Care Organization that allows our clinic to work with other smaller clinics in Nebraska to coordinate our care for fair Medicare reimbursements. Other clinics may do this by working through a hospital or larger corporation, which can limit a patient’s options in referrals or hospital preferences. This organization allows Lincoln Family Medical Group to get fair reimbursements and continue to be privately owned for our patients’ benefit. The organization also helps our clinic be held accountable to high standards for the quality of our care.
A “Welcome to Medicare” exam is a preventative care visit that can be completed only within the first 12 months of being enrolled in Medicare part B. Multiple questions will be asked to assess any risk factors a patient may have, and time will be spent looking over screenings and immunizations that should be completed. Chronic problems are not meant to be addressed at this visit. This visit is covered just one time. You don’t need to have this visit to benefit from annual Medicare wellness exams.
A medicare wellness exam is a preventative care visit covered by part B medicare. This visit is not for routine follow-up care of chronic problems, but rather a time for your provider to review your health overall, discuss screening testing needed, vaccinations, and other preventative services. We will also complete a health risk assessment with various questions and simple tests to check your overall safety. These can be performed every 12 months. Additional problems and questions should not be evaluated during this exam.
Our refills are via fax, phone, and mostly electronic request. These are handled during regular business hours only, 8am-3:30pm. Requests received after 3:30pm will be handled the next business day. All refills are best filled by contacting your pharmacy first. If needed, they will contact your provider for authorization. The requests will be handled by the office staff available the day it is requested. If lab work, appointments, and other necessary testing have all been completed, this will likely be processed if available staff is comfortable doing so. We do have expectations that our patients abide by recommendations for follow up appointments and necessary lab work in which case refills may be denied. Additionally, certain types of medications are usually not automatically refilled. This is not limited to, but would include: pain medications, antibiotics, or medications from other providers.
Our staff is trained to schedule appointments in time slots that will make the office flow better. They need to know what is going on in order to make the appointment appropriately, and in some cases defer potentially life threatening symptoms to the emergency room.
During business hours, the doctors/PA are often busy seeing patients, working on medication refills, fax orders, reviewing blood work and imaging results, as well as covering for other doctors who aren’t in that day. Therefore, our staff has been trained to take messages with questions or suggest appointments if needed. If the doctors took the time to personally return phone calls, there would not be enough time to see our patients or finish the other work that only they can do.
If you are having sudden, severe pain, difficulty breathing, or need immediate assistance, you should call 911 or present to the emergency room for evaluation. For other non-urgent or general questions, you should call the office and our staff will direct you appropriately. Our knowledgeable medical assistants (MAs) will help determine if an appointment should be scheduled.
It is best to try to see the same doctor for ongoing problems. This allows a doctor to become familiar with you and your medical problems. There will be times when your doctor is not available and it is understandable that a different doctor be consulted at those times.
A Physician Assistant, or PA, is a trained medical provider that is licensed to diagnose, treat, and care for patients just like physicians do. They work along with physicians, and can help out when a doctor is unavailable or in many cases they share the work and some have their own patients as well. By law a PA must work in conjunction with a physician, but is qualified to do the same tasks their supervising physician can. You will find PAs working in every specialty of medicine including surgery.
Annual exams are an opportunity for your doctor to review your overall health and potentially uncover any undiagnosed problems. We can discuss risk factors you have and ways to prevent further health problems. This also includes routine screening and immunizations. This is a visit where we try to focus on overall health and not discuss individual problems in depth. Screening blood work and studies may be scheduled as well as immunizations given.
To schedule a formal checkup, this would be called an annual exam. It will be important to let the scheduler know if you are a medicare patient as those are scheduled as a welcome to medicare or medicare wellness exam. Additionally, if you have had an annual exam here or at any other facility in the last 12 months, this may not be covered by insurance.
The office phones are answered on non-holidays, Monday through Friday from 8:00am-4:30pm. After those hours, if there is an emergency you should call 911 or go to the emergency room. If there is an urgent need that cannot wait until the next day’s office hours, there is an answering service that will take a message and get it to a provider from our office that is on-call. We will get back to you with an answer shortly.
There is no set fee for appointments. The fee will be determined upon the number and complexity of problems, time needed for the appointment, and any insurance benefits you may have.
Many circumstances will change the medications that a person is taking. We must check with you every time to make sure any new medications you are taking or old medications you have stopped taking are accurate in our chart. This ensures you the best and safest treatment.
When you come to your appointment, please have your insurance card, medication list, any questions you want to ask, as well as any records we may have asked you to bring such as blood pressure readings, blood sugar logs, outside lab work, immunization records etc.
Fasting lab work is blood drawn while in a “fasting” state. This requires no food or caloric intake in the previous 8-10 hours. Water or black coffee is acceptable.