Someone forgot?

During the consultation on 16th April, we accepted Dr Tan's suggested date of surgery 22nd April. My mum is still covered by an AIA health insurance policy and fortunately Penang Adventist Hospital (PAH) is not only a panel hospital (need to fork out deposit first), it is also designated "platinum" i.e. totally cashless.

Panel hospital will apply for a Guarantee Letter (GL) directly from AIA. Dr Tan's nurse asked me to call them if we don't get notification from AIA (about the outcome of the application) before the surgery. From my experience with AIA during my hospitalisation for the arthroscopic knee surgery, it shouldn't take long for AIA to process the application after submission.

However, by Sat, 20th April, there was still no notification. A check on the AIA app revealed no such application. Hmph! So on Sunday, before we drove to Butterworth, I called PAH in the morning. They said they woud check and get back to me. Almost half an hour later, it suddenly I wondered how they would know who to call because they didn't ask for my phone number or the patient's name. So I called back and I was informed that the doctor just did the application (honestly, I thought I might have misheard this part because it sounded unbelievable!). I should then receive message from AIA later that day.

As we on the way to Butterworth, I constantly checked the AIA app. At one point, I noticed that the application was there but the admission date was 24th April. So I called PAH again but I was told by the general line customer service officer that the clinic was already close (half-day). I told her of my concern. After some checking, she assured me that the surgery was still on 22nd April and by sheer coincidence, the line started cracking up when she said something about the insurance lol. Whatever. I highly suspect that AIA stipulates application for GL has to be done at least 3 days before admission and hence 24th April is the earliest that PAH can select, assuming that they just did it on 21st.

Later that evening/night I received notifications from AIA in this order:

  1. They received GL application.
  2. They asked feedback from PAH and suspended the process until then.
  3. They received feedback from PAH and resumed the processing.
  4. They gave conditional approval to GL, which was to be used within the next 30 days.

Kudos to AIA for processing this quickly and on a Sunday too. 

There was no problem with this during the 3-hours time (will be blogged separately) we spent at the hospital before we left mum in the care of a nurse except at the Admission counter. Because the actual admission date (22nd April) is two days earlier than that stated in AIA's system, they cannot process the admission as usual. Fortunately, the staff there left us out of this problem and dealt directly with Dr Tan's nurse and AIA. They managed to get AIA to change the date to 22nd April.

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