What to Bring to Your First Specialist Appointment

Bring a list of your medicines, your insurance cards, your other doctors' names and phone numbers, your recent records, and your questions. Then call the office and ask what else it wants. Here is a fuller checklist.

Checklist

• Medicines: a list of everything you take, with the dose and how often, including over-the-counter medicines, vitamins and herbal remedies or supplements. Some doctors would rather see the bottles. Ask the office.
• Allergies and bad reactions to medicines.
• Insurance cards.
• Your other doctors: names and phone numbers, and your pharmacy's phone number.
• Recent lab results with dates, and imaging reports, hospital discharge summaries or a referral note if you have them. Ask the office which ones it wants.
• A one-page summary of your conditions, medicines and results. Our one-page health summary template shows what to include.
• Your questions, most important first.
• Glasses or a hearing aid, if you use them. The National Institute on Aging suggests having them with you.
• A family member or friend, if that would help. The National Institute on Aging says a companion can take notes and remind you what you wanted to ask.

What to send ahead

Call the specialist's office and ask:

1. Do you want records before the visit, or should I bring them?
2. How should I send them: portal upload, secure message, fax or mail?
3. Is there a form I can fill out at home first?
4. Have you received anything from my referring doctor?

If your records are at several places, our guide to sending all your records to a new doctor covers how to gather them, and the one on downloading lab results from MyChart covers the portal part.

Questions to prepare

Write down why you were referred, what has changed since your last visit, and what you most want to understand by the end of the visit. Put the most important items first. AHRQ, the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, has a Question Builder app and a short brochure to help you prepare for appointments (linked in the sources below).

What to do with the files

If your lab results are in several places, Phi Longevity PRISM can pull them into a one-page Care Team Brief with each result's date and its source, trends over time, and the guideline behind each flag. You can print it or save it as a PDF and bring it with your own list of medicines and questions.

Start free: build my Care Team Brief →

What Phi Longevity PRISM does not do

It does not diagnose, and it does not tell you what to ask or what the specialist should do. It reads lab results today; medicines, diagnoses and allergies are not imported yet, so those are yours to add. Your doctor decides what you need.