This place is a disaster. In my 25 years living in...

This place is a disaster. In my 25 years living in Keene I can only say 2 nice things about this hospital; an obgyn that I've seen in the past was great, and the team that drove the ambulance to Dartmouth Hitchcock was wonderful. Everything else has been a nightmare. I'm sure plenty of people have had great experiences here, but I can't say the same.

Since I am a resident in Walpole I go to the Walpole Clinic branch, and the staff there is very nice, but I can't continue dealing with Cheshire Medical Center and their billing department. I have been receiving bills 1 1/5-3 weeks after the invoice date leaving me with only a few days to pay the bill.

Most recently I called to inquire as to why a service from Feb 3rd didn't show up on a bill until May 3rd and the customer service rep blamed my insurance. While I don't doubt my insurance took forever to pay their portion of the bill, I find it hard to believe they were completely at fault especially considering it has taken Cheshire Medical 3 weeks at times to mail me a bill. When I asked the customer service why they would date an invoice on April 4th, but I wouldn't receive it until April 26th the rep replied "Well I don't know what to say about that". The rep was rude, and at one point finally said "I'm not sure what you expect me to do?!". I could tell she just wanted me off the phone so I responded to her very politely "I guess nothing. That's what I've come to expect from this hospital; nothing. Thank you" and I hung up the phone. I didn't want to hang up on the rep, but I also didn't want to continue a conversation with someone that didn't care about helping me or taking even a little bit of responsibility for the problems I was experiencing.

I was never rude to the rep, nor did I demand anything of her except to know why it was taking them so long to get my bills mailed to me. 10 minutes after I ended the phone call, I received a voice mail from the automated attendant at Cheshire Medical asking me to return their call. I never called them back, because, and I'm assuming of course, they wanted to discuss my hanging up on the customer service rep, but if they were really concerned they should have had a real person call me back, not some automated attendant. And I find it funny that, it only took Cheshire Medical 3 DAYS to cash my check, but weeks to send me an updated invoice, or any invoice for that matter. I mailed my check out on Friday and it was cashed the following Tuesday by 10am.

Clearly Cheshire Medical needs to work on it's customer service skills. Maybe they could take all the money and man hours they spend on sending me brochures about how to quit smoking seminars (hello I don't smoke!) and surveys about my recent scheduled appointments, and spend the money and time on some customer service training and staff competent enough to mail the bills out on time.