Enhanced fees for specialists help facilitate better care

The connection with doctors, fees and improving patient care is often lost when talking about the health care.  Yet - fees define what doctors can do for patients under our public health care system.

The Specialist Services Committee (SSC) is introducing a new Multidisciplinary Complex Patient Conferencing fee to better support coordination of care for complex patients. SSC’s existing fees have been improved to expand the communications methods specialists use to provide advice by including the use of face-to-face, video conferencing and email. Also, the fees for Group Medical Visits have increased by 50%. Moving forward, we plan to continue assessing the fees and making improvements.

Part of the mandate of the Specialist Services Committee (SSC), a partnership of Doctors of BC and the BC government, is to develop and fund fees to help better deliver needed specialist advice and quality patient care.

Several years ago, SSC developed a number of fees to increase capacity, better coordinate care and improve patient access and care; particularly when primary care physicians seek specialists’ advice.  Our fees focus on Advanced Care Planning, Discharge Care Planning, Group Medical Visits and Specialist Advice Fees.

With a quality improvement lens, SSC conducted two external evaluations of these fees. The results were validated through feedback from individual specialists, specialist section heads and an SSC working group with representatives from Doctors of BC and the Ministry of Health. This comprehensive evaluation process helped us identify key barriers and opportunities for improvement.

The new and enhanced SSC fees became available on November 1, 2015. Comprehensive information about the fees are available here. 

Since requests for advice are often initiated by primary care physicians, all doctors are encouraged to learn more about these specialist fees, and how they can help support you to provide quality patient care in a timely and efficient way.