I made an appointment with Dr Austin because he came highly recommended and I was told by other surgeons that he is one of the best for TMJ surgery. When I went to his office for the first appointment his front office staff was short with me. They weren't friendly or unfriendly just seemed like they would rather be doing something else. The back office staff was friendly and enjoyable. Dr Austin was great to work with. He listened to all my issues and explained different treatment options. I decided to go with arthroplasty surgery due to his success rates of arthroplasty vs arthrocentesis. This was when things went downhill fast. Shelly the office manager said she sent over the prior authorization forms to my insurance and that she would check and let me know the Tuesday before my surgery what was going on with insurance. I got no call on Tuesday so I went into the office to ask Shelly what was going on with the prior authorization and if surgery was still going to happen on Thursday. She said, that I didn't need a prior authorization. I told her that I did and that she said she sent it. She told me she would look into it. She called me later and said that her fax machine was broke so she thought she had sent it but actually it wasn't sent, so she sent it that day. She never called my insurance to check on anything; had she done this she would have known that her fax was never sent. She was very rude with me and made me feel like this was somehow my fault. She kept saying, I don't know what you want me to do. She also said that it probably wouldn't have been authorized in time anyway. If it wouldn't have been authorized it would have been processed at least 15 days sooner than it was. Surgery was canceled the day before the scheduled surgery. This was after I scheduled time off work and got registered and labs drawn for the surgery. I decided to still go with Dr Austin and rescheduled the surgery. This time the insurance asked for additional information because Shelly did not include all the documentation in the prior authorization form. Again my surgery was canceled, this time 2 days prior to surgery. My insurance ultimately denied the prior authorization because they said they had insufficient documentation from the Dr's office. The documentation was still insufficient after they sent over additional notes. I will not be seeing Dr Austin again and have made an appointment with Dr Baldwin in SLC who also comes highly recommended. I only choose Dr Austin because he was closer to my home. I would not recommend Dr Austin to anyone, due to his staff. They are incompetent at their jobs. They work in a customer service oriented field and have an attitude that they hate customers.
out of 5 stars
