COVID triage machine 3000
—> You answered: NO. The patient does not have any symptoms or exposure. Here’s how to get advice or testing for other situations.
Testing without symptoms or exposures:
In most cases testing is not necessary, but some reasons families may seek testing without symptoms or exposures include the following:
School requirements
Clearance for sports or camps
Travel (pre or post)
Other, such as prior to a family get together.
Home test kits are ideal for this. Test twice, 1 day apart. Follow the OHA’s recommendations on what to do with results/exposures. Tests can be purchased at many local pharmacy or grocery stores or delivered via services like Instacart. Some, like Walgreens, may be able to bill your insurance.
If you specifically require PCR testing, we may be able to test in such situations, depending on availability. Note that insurance may not pay for testing in situations without symptoms or known exposure. There’s no easy way to find out in advance, so just be prepared to pay out of pocket* in the event they don’t consider it a covered benefit.
In periods of supply constraints we may be forced to limit testing to medical necessity until the constraint is lifted, but as long as we have the supply we are happy to help you out. If we’re not able to help, there are many local options for testing such as pharmacies, Curative, and urgent care centers.
To schedule a test, call our office to schedule a Telehealth visit with your doctor and a parking lot nasal swab for COVID screening. Yes, the Telehealth part is required (see FAQ below).
The swab may occur either before or after your visit. If before your visit, it will be resulted during your visit.
Note that swabs occurring after 4:30 pm may be resulted the following business day, otherwise they will be same day. We use in-house PCR testing (~45 minute results).
Advice without testing:
Call our office to schedule a Telehealth visit to discuss your concerns and/or answer your pandemic-related questions. Note that your insurance may or may not consider this a covered benefit.
FAQ:
Why is a Telehealth visit required if all we need is a test? Ordering, performing and resulting any medical test requires gathering information, making a clinical assessment and then making a management recommendation. These are the basic components of a physician “evaluation and management” (“E&M”) required for medical tests and they must be documented in a patient chart. This evaluation and management can be brief if there's not much going on, but it does need to occur.
There are times when tests are performed on days other than when this E&M occurs, but that E&M has occurred and has been documented (eg if we order an anemia test during your child’s well check and they get it done a month later, the clinical decision to order that test was documented at that well check).
If you come in early for your child’s nasal swab and then skip the scheduled Telehealth visit, you will be responsible for a visit cancellation fee ($50) in addition to rescheduling that visit.
Definitions and other notes:
*Self-pay visits: If you receive a bill and contact our office right away, we are usually able to extend a 30% prompt pay discount on COVID testing visits which will reduce your costs. As of right now that would bring it down to $87.50 for PCR (less if we just do the antigen test) and $87.50 for the visit, provided it’s straight forward with a negative test result. Why is there a visit charge? Even testing in these situations requires the physician to perform the basic elements of a visit: they must review and document the patient’s clinical information into the chart including reason for testing, absence of exposure, absence of specific symptoms, absence of any obvious physical exam findings. The absence of findings along with a negative result will make it our cheapest visit, but it’s still a visit :) Be mindful that if you wish to discuss non-covered questions on top of this it could increase the level of the visit based on time spent. But questions about other symptoms or medical concerns (eg ingrown toenail) would typically be covered by your insurance and in fact could increase probability of visit coverage.
Important: this triage system is only applicable to established patients of Trailhead Pediatrics and is not general medical advice for the public, nor are our services available to patients who are not established in our care.
Same-day appointments
For urgent needs, same-day appointments are available Monday through Friday. Please call as early in the day as possible, the more notice we have the easier it is to fit everyone in.
Need help outside of office hours?
Firstly, if your child has an emergency, please call 911 or go directly to the ER - they will contact us if needed once your child has been evaluated.
Urgent Care centers can also be helpful when something needs to be seen outside of office hours but it's not an emergency.
For our list of preferred Urgent Cares and ERs, see our resources page.
And if you have something that might need urgent attention but you're not sure/don't know what to do, we can help: