April 5, 2019 — Seeing your child sick or injured is a stressful experience, and, for many families, a big part of their anxiety is figuring out how to pay for their child’s care.  At Rady Children’s, that’s where the Financial Counseling team comes in.

This team is integrally involved in the Hospital’s mission to provide quality care to everyone who needs it, and they do an incredible job of bringing patient families financial peace of mind. They work hand in hand with families to help them with the logistics of government-sponsored health benefit programs, such as Medi-Cal; low-cost health insurance; payment plans; or the Hospital’s financial assistance program. Sometimes, that means spending hours assisting with detailed applications (some more than 20 pages long!) or walking families through the finer points of coinsurance, copays, deductibles and premiums.

This team is efficiently organized to work with specific specialties at Rady Children’s. One team member is assigned to work in one or a few areas, divided as follows:

• Outpatient
• 2 Rose and NICU Nelson
• Scripps Chula Vista, Scripps Mercy, La Jolla and Encinitas NICUs
• 4 East and ACP NICU
• International families
• PICU, CVICU, 3East and CAPS
• Hematology/Oncology and the MBU
• Emergency Department
  

  With my “key to financial success”

They presented me with my own “Key to Financial Success”— a key holder in the shape of a key! A very appropriate item, since this team works tirelessly to unlock financial assistance for our families. As they expressed, they are “dedicated to providing excellent financial guidance with compassion and professionalism to our RCHSD families.”

With my passport stamped and gifts in hand, I left confident in the fact that this team is putting our patient families first, advocating for them during difficult times, and helping them worry less about financial concerns and focus more on what’s really important: getting their child well again.