Hospital Lies and Lapses

  How to tell the difference and does it really matter if:
     * you're hospitalized for parts of 6 days, and no one mentions a crucial finding from testing on the first day
     * you're told results will be posted on your patient portal. One result appears for one day and then disappears into the ether.
     * you're later told, on call to hospital help desk, that pathology reports are  never posted on patient portal. You know this is not true, as you have many such postings over the years, the most recent Nov. 2017.
      *you're told the posting date is 15 days after receipt, then told 14 days, but the release date on their own home page says it's 7 days.
     * the bricks and mortar department of medical records prints out what they say is 56 pages of your requested records, but they are not what you requested and there are only 25 total pages, many of them blank, but you paid for 56
     * the staff searches the printer to see if the rest of the pages are there. Maybe they went to someone else?
     * you're told that the search was unsuccessful because the medical records person didn't know where to look because she's new here.
     * no one knows where some of your records are and have no explanation as to where they went, or how some were deleted from your portal
     * the contact information for portal help routes you to a patient advocate who says she's not very familiar with the patient portal
     * you are told all patients are assigned a Hospitalist, but though you were there for 6 days, Oops, you were not assigned one.
     *you're told the person responsible for informing you of "suspicious mass" would either be the Emergency Room doctor, who referred you for admission or the admitting doctor, a surgeon who was ready to operate if necessary. Although you were in the hospital for 5 more days.
    * the nurse from Interventional Radiology brings your lab script to the desk, but after a wait of 75 minutes you ask why the wait and several desk workers finally say the script was not there, no apologies either
    * you are referred to the Patient Portal Expert, a white-haired woman who knows less about the portal than you do. Honest.She is unable to open the home page, has incorrect information as to date of release information for results, and is wrong about how the results page opens up.She is unable to link your portal with the hospital's, though it had been working fine for several years up to now.
  * not only is much of the staff unfamiliar with patient portals,they are also unaware of the existence of a patient advocate/ representative
 CONCLUSION:  Hospital pays for expensive publicists who tout the hospital's impressive policies and offerings, but there is a wide disconnect between the ideal and the implemented.
 Those who think this is an isolated set of circumstances are probably wrong; many patients are blissfully unaware of what goes on in the dark reaches of the halls of healing.*
* Had I not read on my patient portal, back when it was functioning as it should, I would not have discovered, 2 weeks after discharge, that an important health finding had been ignored so the incompetencies*  above would never have come to light.
  **At first I thought  conspiracy theory: after I notified the hospital's patient advocate, who, contrary to publicized intent, prioritizes the hospital's interests, that no one told me the most important finding, damage control kicks in and postings disappear, even from the medical records department.  The hospital's litigation department takes over, expunging potentially damaging material.
    That remains a possibility, but one that could well be subsumed by the general ignorance and lack of concern in the atmosphere of the facility itself.  Who knows.