Patient Advocacy · Care Coordination
The BellWell Letter is our free email list. We give you the tools to navigate healthcare problems, and we walk you through them start to finish, the way we would for our own family.
Join the BellWell LetterSome of the people who write to us are dealing with their own health. Others are helping a parent, a spouse, or a friend. Most are doing this for the first time.
So we write out the things we wish more families knew, one letter at a time.
Some weeks that is a fight: the insurance company said no, or the hospital wants to send your mother home before she is ready. Those letters give you the words to use and what to ask for in writing, while there is still time.
Other weeks it is just a lot to sort out: what to confirm before someone comes home, or what the hospital's own helpers can and cannot do for you.
Short enough to read on your phone, and useful the same week.
BellWell Health is a small private practice. The name comes from my grandmother. Bell was her middle name. She had ten adult children, six daughters and four sons, who shared the work of looking after her: getting her to appointments, going in with her, and speaking up for her when something needed to be said. Most people do not have a soccer team of adult kids to oversee their care. Whatever the size of your team, we are happy to sub in.
Some of our work is dealing with insurance companies and hospitals when something goes wrong. The rest is the same day-to-day help her children gave her: going along to important appointments, doing the research before a big decision, preparing the questions, and being the go-between for the family and the doctor.
Before BellWell, I spent nearly a decade working inside big hospital systems. So I know how these decisions happen: a real person applies a written rule, and both the person and the rule can be questioned. Most families are never told that.
Doctors handle the medicine. We handle everything around it: the follow-up calls nobody has time to make, the questions that never get answered in a fifteen-minute appointment, the bills that do not add up, and the denial letter that can still be appealed. And we answer to you, not to a hospital or an insurance company.
