Northwestern Medicine Outpatient Rehabilitation Old Irving Park

"I thought I would share an experience with something that happened with Northwestern Hospital's Physical Therapy Dept. The end of October I started physical therapy for my lower back pain and some spasms I was having. I started going to their Old Irving Park location. I started my therapy and on the first day my therapist said they have an app that I should download, and it would have the program loaded that my therapist created for me, this app included videos that showed the exercise and also had a message board so if I had a question for my therapist. This app was new to the physical therapy dept, about 3-4 years old. In December I happen to be looking at my insurance claims in my insurance portal when I came across two claims that were partially paid. I looked and saw they had vision lenses as a service from NW that I had done. This is when my research started with both my insurance and with Northwestern. This took many phone calls with both parties from various departments which I am still doing today. I had documents sent to me to compare with the claims. I keep notes of every phone call including date, time and person I spoke with and including escalating my phone calls to speaking with managers and head of departments. This is what I learned and where the situation stands today. When Northwestern submitted the invoices to my insurance, they included charges for using the app. The medical codes translated differently to the insurance. The insurance saw them as a vision service description. The new PT app service code was never communicated with the insurance, so the insurance was simply seeing this as a vision care service instead of the actual physical therapy app service. Regardless of what transpires from that conversation, the Physical Therapy dept head at Northwestern told me they will be doing a write-off of the high dollar amount. I relayed to her that the PT never told me there were fees to using the app. Of course, they were apologetic and told me they were looking into making some procedure changes around the using of this app. I offered her some suggestions. Other depts submit pre-treatments procedures to the insurance for approval, procedures under physical therapy should not be an exception. Give the patient the option to choose if they want this app, I wasn't given that option. Communicate with the insurance this app procedure and any medical codes associated with the app. Finally, I expressed my concern about wondering how many patients must have paid these fees thinking it was just a partial amount that insurance didn't pick-up. Yep, taking advantage of patients. My intention here is to bring awareness to patients."

"I had a great first appointment with Dr Brianna DeBiasi, and she made the experience so comfortable. Starting physical therapy can feel overwhelming, but Dr Bri was both professional and approachable, helping me feel at ease from the start. She explained everything clearly, and set me up on a good little routine to work on at home."

"New building with wonderful physical therapy and occupational therapy!"