Jon Ogden

Review of Utah Valley Regional Medical C...

I've had two experiences with this hospital, and b...

I've had two experiences with this hospital, and both of them were horrible.

The first experience was for the birth of my first child. The doctor wanted to schedule an induction because the baby was past due and because Friday morning was perfect for his schedule. When the hospital performed a stress test for the baby, everything showed that the baby was perfectly fine; however, they still started to schedule an induction. My wife didn't feel okay with that, and so we left.

The pregnancy started on its own the next day, and we quickly realized that the nurses at the hospital had no idea how to handle a birth that wasn't induced and didn't involve an epidural. They attached a heart-rate monitor to my wife to track the health of the baby, but since they didn't attach it correctly it kept picking up my wife's heart rate intermittently. When that happened (and it happened three times over the course of the pregnancy), the nurses would rush in and say that the baby's life was in danger. And then they would realize that, no, they just hadn't attached the heart rate monitor correctly. When the baby was born (healthy and totally fine), the nurses were surprised that my wife could move her legs. They weren't used to someone who hadn't been induced and didn't have an epidural. In short, while the hospital might be okay for some types of births, it was a horrible experience for someone who wanted a natural birth.

The second experience was when my son went to the hospital for stomach pain. The physician at the clinic ran an ultrasound and said that my son had inflamed lymph nodes in the intestines, but that he couldn't rule out appendicitis. He therefore recommended that we be admitted to the hospital. We requested a digital copy of the ultrasound results because we have a radiologist in the family who could help us diagnose the problem and **we were told the staff was too busy to help us with that.**

So we went to the hospital. The doctor there did a few more tests and quickly ruled out appendicitis. He then advised us to stay because he couldn't pinpoint what the problem was. We agreed, but then we started reading online about inflamed nodes in the intestines and found that every single symptom matched what our son was experiencing. By this point it was 4:00 am, and we wanted to leave. We asked the nurse for an update, and we were told that we'd have to wait until the doctor visited us which wasn't until several hours later, at 10:00 am. At that point the doctor let us go. Our son recovered soon on his own, just like the reading we'd done about inflamed lymph nodes said he would.

Our son received absolutely no help from the hospital. In fact, the hospital only aggravated the problem because they wouldn't let him eat or drink even though he kept crying that he was thirsty and even though not eating or drinking is horrible for the particular condition he had.

Then the hospital charged us $2300 for the visit, and that didn't include the $600 in physician costs. In other words, **we got hit with $2900 in charges for receiving no help at all beyond the diagnosis.**

I decided that I wanted to appeal these charges. I visited the billing office, and one of the first things the employee I talked to there said was that she thought the charges for the nurses ($110 an hour for 17 hours) and the room ($1128) seemed really high. She said she thought the hospital would be willing to work with us.

Unfortunately, after several phone calls and letters and email interchanges with the patient relations office, we found that they were unwilling to lower the costs at all. They just kept saying that the services had been performed and the amounts were correct.

In sum, Utah Valley Regional Medical Center doesn't seem to understand that performing a service isn't the same thing as *caring* for a patient. They don't care about you on an individual level. They're an uncaring, impersonal factory.