Lisa Rausch at Denver’s Rose Medical Center is a poor Supervisor of Case Management.

Call this my case study of complaining about Twitter, part two. As you might recall, it took complaining on Twitter to get customer service out of Telekom, but in the end, I became happy, and, after having a second problem resolved, Telekom is rapidly moving off my list of companies with customer service issues.

Now I actually do not like to publicly air all of my complaints—although to many of you this might come as a surprise.

At this juncture I am extremely frustrated with one Lisa Rausch at Rose Medical Center in Denver, Colorado. I am singling her out because she is ignoring my emails, although over all I find it hard to believe that Rose Medical Center is one of the United States’ top 100 hospitals, a feat advertised on the hospital’s website:

Colorado’s only Reuters 100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks winner. This prestigious annual award means that patients at Rose hospital are more likely to receive reliable, efficient care at a reasonable cost with high satisfaction.

If Rose Hospital is above average, then I hate to imagine what hospitals that didn’t make the list are like.

So here’s the back story: in September my father was admitted to Rose Hospital for heart surgery. By all accounts the surgery went well. The hardest part, for me, is being 5,000 miles away. I’ve been calling regularly and talking to my mother. Unfortunately the news is not all good, but I will redact any of the story after October 12, 2010, because it is not germane to why I am upset with Rose Medical Center.

You see, the morning of October 11, my mother visited my father at Rose Hospital. In the afternoon my sister went to visit him, only to discover that he was no longer there.

He had been moved from Rose Medical Center with nary a warning or phone call to my Mother.

My Mother was reduced to calling his primary care physician the next morning, October 12, asking, “Where is my husband?”

I cannot imagine any worse way for anybody to learn that their loved one has been moved from one hospital to another than showing up in the hospital room and finding it empty, or being stopped by a nurse in the hallway to be informed that that their loved one has been moved, but without any information as to where.

Given that the rest of my family is immersed in the details of my father’s care, while it is more of an abstraction for me, I decided to pursue and investigate this bizarre action by Rose Medical Center. Given that I didn’t know where to start, I started with Twitter—complaining about the hospital’s actions, which resulted in somebody from the hospital contacting me asking me for details.

I wrote a note to this person – the most important paragraph stating:

Surely somebody could have called my mother and told her where my Father was moving–actually, they could have called my Mother and told her that they were going to move him in the first place. This is a very basic thing to do. It is, in fact, I would hope, human kindness and empathy at work.

Initially I was impressed. It did not take that long for somebody from the hospital to respond to my Tweet, and for her to respond to this note informing me that it was being investigated and that “I’m going to look into it, and will have someone follow up with you shortly.”

Now I don’t know about you, but shortly, would to me, indicate about a week.

I waited 13 days, sending several reminders, getting no response, before Tweeting again.

Magically, within hours of my Tweeting, I finally got a response from somebody—one Lisa Rausch, the Supervisor of Case Management at Rose Medical Center—who wrote what appeared to be a cookie cutter response with appropriate details plugged in—she responded to the empathy part, agreeing “that your mother should not have been reduced to calling a doctor and having to ask where her husband is”.

The response to the substantive part of my complaint, about the lack of communication was particularly mealy-mouthed:

My department is responsible for informing all parties involved in our patient’s care, of the discharge plan as it develops. Family is indeed part of the “parties involved”. I have addressed the importance of clear, explicit communication with my staff to our patients and their family members being involved in all aspects of discharge planning.

Unfortunately for Lisa Rausch, I don’t believe anything has changed. Given that my complaint was about the lack of communication, the fact that it took her 13 days to get back to me only signals to me that “the importance of clear, explicit communication” is not something she actually takes to heart.

I imagine that the addressing of this communication issue with her staff consisted of them standing around the coffee pot, each person with a steaming cup of coffee, and her saying something like, “Guys, we messed up and should have called this guy’s family. I didn’t realize that there was a complainer in the family—fortunately the complainer in Berlin, so he won’t be stopping by to complain in person. Be more careful next time.” Everybody left this coffee pot pow-wow with a still full, steaming hot, cup of coffee.

With this in mind I wrote back to Lisa Rausch, telling her that I wanted more information, “I would really like to know what has actually changed at Rose Hospital to prevent this from happening again,” which can be distilled into two key questions:

1. What has changed to prevent this type of incident from happening in the future?
2. What are the consequences for the individuals involved should an incident like this happen again?

Given that the answers to this question might be (commercially) sensitive and inappropriate to answer via email, I’ve even suggest that I would be more than happy to schedule a meeting with her for the next time I am in Denver—with several possible dates proposed.

She’s ignoring me.

So much for the comment by Kenneth Feiler, President and CEO of Rose Medical Center, in the press release announcing the 100 ranking:

“At Rose, every person on our staff is obsessed with patient care.”