Children's Hospital Los Angeles : Autism Services

They are the worst!!! Their waiting list is unacceptable. They think they can put a pause on our children's services when in reality we need services ASAP. They don’t understand how Autism works. There is no communication. Yet expect us to donate to provide better services but to who? Not my daughter. No resources. No treatments.

My daughter was age 2 and we were put on a 8 month waiting list for diagnosis of maybe being Autistic. When we finally got a appoint the staff called back said our insurance declined and they couldn't see us. Which it wasn't true our insurance stated they didn't wanted to many hours for my child to receive therapy. The staff didn't want to deal with us and was very rude. We end up going else where and. She was diagnose at age 4. No thanks to children hospital. And guess what her therapy didn't have to be so many hours. Kids on the spectrum are all different. Please get educated and have your staff take a class on how to talk to families.

It has taken 6 months to schedule an appointment with this clinic, but we finally got one. Now that we were finally given an appointment for our child that was about in another month, we get a call saying that the doctor will not be in that day and the appointment has to be changed to an even later date. To make matters even worse on an already stressed family is the limited appointment days and times that they have available... Only at 8 am and only on Tuesdays etc.

We scheduled an appointment with Boone Fetter Clinic and were happy about this since it's not very easy to get an evaluation for a high functioning child with special issues. We sent in all the appropriate registration paperwork, copy of insurance card and all the notes we had from Regional Center, Occupational therapist and neurologist. About 1 month before appointment they emailed that they need copy of insurance card; I had to rescan everything back to them and ask them to email me that they received it. About 2 weeks before appointment I received email about the packet for doctors. I emailed them back that I sent via 2 day shipping and could they look for it (they had it). The website states they check insurance since we as parents don't typically know what codes we would ask the insurance about.; apparently the clinic doesn't do insurance eligibility until the first of the month even though they ask well in advance for your insurance information. I started calling 1 week our appointment because I hadn't heard anything about the insurance and I didn't want to be stuck with a huge bill. The receptionist said it hadn't been done as of that's so I waited until Monday before our appointment, she said she didn't see anything that she would give me a call back. I received no call back. My husband called the day before our appointment and left a message in the morning, no call back. He called again in the afternoon and was told they would call insurance right away. Boone Clinic called me back to tell me appointments have to be canceled because insurance needs prior authorization. If we hadn't called the clinic we would be responsible for a big bill or they would actually have to put in work and request an authorization which could have been done before had they checked insurance prior since we sent in the information well ahead of time. Now we have no appointment and IF we wanted to start again we would have to wait another 5 months.

Children's Hospital is great it is the only place that will treat my son with the patient that he needs if you have a child with a mental disability I would definitely recommend Children's Hospital