Providing independent clinical excellence since 2005
Approximately half of the patients visiting Surrey Cardiovascular Clinic have private medical insurance membership and since 2006, we have fostered relations with every private medical insurance company operating in the UK, and many international ones too.
This process can take up to three years to produce a contract, and is a vital part of our back office operation to ensure that the relationships with the commissioning teams involved are well-maintained.
As a specialist centre of excellence, offering services not found outside teaching hospitals, some of our PMI tariffs for our more sophisticated investigations exceed those of other local providers.
By operating a high-quality service, we reduce the downstream costs to insurance companies. For example, the need for a visit to the cath lab for invasive angiography is lessened by having a first-class virtual angiography service on-site. Here, our consultants can view the images and all the associated downstream data processing, such as CT FFR and fat attenuation index. In most cases, this gives our consultants all they need to manage their patients without the need for hospital care unless an invasive intervention is shown to be needed.
We operate an unrivalled collection of technology, not available in any other local private medical provider, and it comes at a cost. However, we are confident that as we engage with private medical insurance companies, we provide sufficient evidence for them to be satisfied that our higher costs are justified.
Since private medical insurance companies do not include health screening costs as a standard client benefit, we have processes in place, such as free pre-consultation, to ensure that enquiries from patients with medical insurance that are more related to health screening are steered towards our more affordable healthscreening services (which do not require formal and costly consultation), rather than a referral for private consultation, investigation and treatment in every case.
When a patient presents to their GP with symptoms of concern, sometimes a direct access test ordered by the GP is all that is needed to reassure the patient and their GP that all is well. By offering open access tests to our GPs, we facilitate direct access investigation. Instead of every patient requiring a formal referral for consultation and testing, only those patients whose direct access tests show abnormal results need to be formally referred.
With our transparent approach and by offering a range of healthscreens and services, we believe that we are fully engaged with health insurance providers.