Articles from prior issues of The Advocate

January/February, 1999

Highlight on Forest Park Medical Clinic
by Shari Bratt, Great Plains Publication Representative

IN THIS SERIES OF ARTICLES featuring NADE corporate members, we are please to recognize Forest Park Medical Clinic. The clinic, which is set up to provide most of the services DDSs requires, began providing consultative examinations for both the Missouri and the Illinois DDS in 1988. It has full x-ray facilities, EEG capabilities and pulmonary function testing available. Forest Park Medical Clinic is located within blocks of a major academic medical center in the central part of St. Louis, Missouri. Their location ensures that all claimants have easy access to the clinic. The location also helps in recruiting and maintaining the highest quality physician staffing. Camille Greenwald has been director of Forest Park Medical Center since its inception. She was initially trained as a medical librarian,
then she received a degree in business administration. She has worked in the medical field for over 20 years. The clinic has grown from 2 doctors, 2 exam rooms and Ms. Greenwald to 30 physicians and psychologists, 10 exam rooms, and a larger staff. Ms Greenwald is responsible for overall quality control. She states, “I have enjoyed ‘growing up’ with the clinic and all her ‘phone friends’.” she has talked to adjudicators and CE schedulers for years, many whom she has never met in person. Forest Park Medical Clinic gauges their success by four major criteria.

These include:

1) the quality of their medical reports;

2) the timeliness of their service;

3) the ease of their scheduling process; and

4) patient satisfaction.

All providers at Forest Park Medical Clinic and full time staff are educated as to what is required in terms of history and physical findings. All completed exams are proofed by trained staff to ensure that requested findings have been noted. The report is then proofed a second time by the examining physician or psychologist. It is rare that additional information would be necessary. Report timeliness is dependent on the clinic’s ability to provide timely appointments and how effectively reports are processed.

Examinations can be scheduled in two different ways. The first is through a phone call by the DDS. The appointment is scheduled within 10-14 days. Several DDSs allow Forest Park Medical Clinic to contact the claimant and schedule the exam. In that manner, the exam can be scheduled within 1-7 days. Exam reports are completed and in the hands of the disability examiner within 5-7 working days of the examination. The clinic is staffed by multiple medical and psychological
specialties daily. It is easy for DDS to schedule many types of exams with just one phone call, as well as scheduling double examinations for a claimant on the same day. This markedly decreases the “no show” rate. It also serves to decrease the time required to adjudicate a claim. Aware that the process of disability application can be trying to an individual, the clinic attempts to make each claimant’s visit as pleasant as possible. They try to treat each claimant as if he or she were a private patient of one of their doctors. NADE is pleased to recognize the Corporate membership of Forest Park Medical Clinic.