Mercer Internal Medicine, LLC

It is the goal of our medical practice to provide the highest quality of medical care with compassionate and individualized attention to each of our patients. We are continuously working to improve our ability to provide for patient needs. Please let us know if you have any suggestions which might help us better care for our patients.

A physician is available on call 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year. If you are truly in need of emergency assistance during normal business hours, call our regular office number (609) 737-6700 and select Option 1 to speak directly with our staff. If you are calling after hours or on the weekend, call the toll free number 1-(877)-272-5520 to have the on call physician paged and given your message. This answering service phone number is repeated on the voice message when calling our regular office number after hours.

Maintaining patient confidentiality and trust is critical to our mission of providing you with high quality care. Please see our Patient Privacy Policy sheet in our office for details of how we respect issues of patient confidentiality.

Except for emergency situations, patients are seen by appointment only. We do our best to stay on time, but unexpected medical complexities will sometimes create delays in our schedule. If you have a special time constraint, please be sure to notify the office staff so we may better accommodate your needs. If you need to change or cancel an appointment, please give us the courtesy of 24 hours notice. It is a shame when we do not have enough notice to provide another patient an opportunity to make use of an open appointment slot. Please note that a $25 missed appointment fee may apply in the absence of 24 hours notice.

We expect our patients to be financially responsible for the services they receive from our medical practice.  Payment of insurance copays, deductibles, and outstanding balances are required prior to your visit with a physician.  Speak to our physician or billing staff if you have an unusual financial hardship that requires special accommodations.

Please permit us 5 business days to process referral requests (most referrals are completed within a day or two, but some referrals require insurance authorizations that delay processing another few days). We will do our best to expedite emergency referrals. If you desire a referral to a specialist for a new problem not previously evaluated by our office, we advise that you arrange an appointment with one of our physicians so we can properly assess the condition and how it might best be treated. If you need a referral for a test or procedure ordered by another office, a doctor’s order with diagnosis and procedure code must be delivered to our office to properly process the referral request.

When diagnostic studies are ordered by our physicians, patients are usually informed of important test findings by phone or mail when results become available. If only routine labs are ordered and the findings are unremarkable, the physicians will sometimes elect to wait until the next appointment to discuss test results. If your circumstances require immediate feedback about test results, you may call and leave a message for our nurses and physicians requesting the needed information.

Medical forms (school/work physical forms and disability forms) are best filled out during an office visit. Forms completed by a nurse or physician without the benefit of an office appointment may be subject to a fee.

Our clinical staff is often asked by patients for advice, diagnostic assessments, and treatments over the telephone without being seen for an office exam. Providing medical care over the phone without the benefit of an office appointment creates multiple problems. First of all, a proper medical diagnosis and the development of an appropriate treatment plan require examination by a physician. Our goal of providing high quality care to our patients is undermined if we are not afforded the opportunity to properly examine an individual to best know what medical intervention is needed. Secondly, providing medical care without an office examination increases the possibility of misdiagnosis, inappropriate treatment, and medical liability. The third problem created by phone medicine relates to staffing. Our physicians and nurses are busy throughout the day providing direct medical care to patients in the office. Telephone calls asking for medical advice and treatment uses physician and nursing time which is supposed to be dedicated to the care of patients who make the effort to come in for a scheduled appointment.

In the interest of quality care, limiting medical liability, and making the most effective use of our clinical resources, we ask our patients to minimize requests for medical care by phone without the benefit of an office appointment.