Dr. Anna Chacko: Problem Magnet or Whistleblower? -Part 1

The tumultuous past of Dr. Anna Chacko, Part 1

Dr. Anna Chacko has had a tumultuous past. Now, Chacko has re-appeared as part of an inquiry into the Pittsburgh VA hospital. Is Chacko a whistleblower–or a magnet for the problems of other people? A 2-part series By Michael Volpe.

“Kiss my big Indian Ass.”

That’s what Dr. Anna Chacko screamed as security carried her out of Lahey Clinic in Boston, upon her termination after spending the last five years (2001-2006) there. Rest assured it wasn’t the only drama she caused there.

Here’s how the daughter of a former secretary of Chacko’s at Lahey Clinic described her mothers’ experience,

“My mom worked for this tyrant, as her admin, for 3.5 years. She absolutely sucked the life out of my mother. She finally got relief when AKC (Chacko) was removed from Lahey Clinic. I was not aware that anyone knew how evil this woman is and am relieved to know that the word is spreading. My whole family suffered as a result of the way she treated my mom as well as other co-workers.”

There’s two stories that are notorious in Lahey involving Chacko. . Here’s how a current radiologist at Lahey described an incident in which Chacko attacked a resident who’d been invited to sit in on a radiology staff meeting.

“The resident, an American educated daughter of immigrant Indian professionals, was a resident in Radiology in our department from July 01 to June 05 and had first hand trauma from her. She made a minor error, tiny and not clinically significant. But she had resisted Dr. Chacko’s effort to make a big deal out of it. She did not become subservient and grovel. At the next staff meeting, the resident was assigned to attend and Dr. Chacko laid into her, called her lazy, careless, stupid, etc. We, the staff, sat in horror, too amazed to speak up. We looked at each other in shock, and just as we were about to say enough, lets move on, she stopped and discussed another issue. But she swung that issue around to residents and then began the attack this resident anew. We were too shocked to say anything, we looked around like “are we hearing this correctly, this is too much”. We were whispering and about to say move on when she stopped, started on another item. The item was again artificially swung to residents in general and then on to this resident again. We again listened and were about to speak up and the cycle repeated itself 6 or 7 times, each time a shorter echo
but no less personally violent.”

Another incident was made famous because Chacko proudly told everyone about it. Here’s how a vendor remembers the story, “

Shortly after a meeting where Joe Hogan (then CEO of radiology at GE and in the future CEO of GE Health care) went to Lahey, he and his entourage went back to the Corporate Jet which was sitting at Hanscom airfield in Lexington, MA. She said that she was in her office and the phone rang. It was Joe Hogan telling her to go outside and look up. Allegedly he had the pilot “dip” the wings back and forth as they passed low overhead. She was very proud of that one.”

That story is also just one example of the close relationship Chacko has with GE. From Lahey Clinic, Dr. Chacko moved on to a stint at the Boston University Medical Center(BUMC). In the fall of 2006, Dr. Anna Chacko first began negotiating with St. James Hospital in Butte, Mt. to take over as their chief of radiology even though she’d only worked at BUMC for about six months. She would take over at St. James the following July, after putting in only about a year at BUMC.

This stop was full of drama as well. At St. James, Dr. Anna Chacko brought in her own team, and thus, the three radiologists on staff at the time were terminated prior to her arrival. Each of the three, Dr. Michael Driscoll, Dr. Dennis Wright, and Dr. Jesse Cole, have sued St. James in relation to their termination. Before even arriving at St. James, Dr. Chacko accused Dr. Cole, in December of 2006, of threatening her on a phone call. Because he currently has litigation pending, Dr. Cole will say little to the press but has said repeatedly

“I categorically deny ever threatening Dr. Anna Chacko.”

A Montana court would eventually issue a restraining order barring Dr. Cole from getting within 150 feet of Dr. Chacko but that was eventually lifted and the charges dropped. Only his counter suit still remains pending.

That wasn’t the only lawsuit involving Dr. Chacko at St. James. The Radiology manager at St. James, Kristi George, would file suit against St. James Hospital in December of 2007, alleging that Dr. Anna Chacko was engaged in a campaign to have her (George) terminated and the hospital wasn’t properly protecting.

5[1][1].29.09 Second Amended Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial

George filed this suit while both she and Chacko were still working at St. James and she had to take a leave of absence from St. James to seek medical assistance from the stress she says she suffered at the hands of Dr. Anna Chacko.

That’s not the only complaint of abuse against her at St. James. Dr. Chacko’s secretary at St. James, Linda Murphy, says that Chacko engaged in a psychological reign of terror against her. Murphy says that Chacko made a habit of calling Murphy at home in the middle of the night (2-3 in the morning) and ask mundane requests like helping Chacko get her computer to work. Murphy said that if she didn’t answer the phone, Chacko would continue to call until she did. On one occasion, Murphy went on a short vacation with her son right before he was to go off to college. She says that Chacko called her repeatedly throughout the vacation, forced her to come home a day early, and then forced her to work a sixteen hour day upon her return. Murphy was eventually fired and when that occurred, she says that an associate of Dr. Chacko’s, Scott Steinfeldt, who ran the St. James imaging center at the time, told her, “you know too much about Anna,” in explaining her firing.

Both Kristi George and Scott Steinfeldt would eventually be terminated as well. Meanwhile, in March of 2008, James Kiser, then CEO of St. James and the man that hired Dr. Anna Chacko, resigned from his position citing a, “time for a change” Chacko would resign five months later and all four radiologists in her department would resign with her. A group from Helena would take over. This means that the radiology department would have been completely turned over twice in less than two years all related to Chacko’s hiring and resignation. Meanwhile, the team of Driscoll, Wright, and Cole had given St. James a combined seventy years of service prior to their removal.

Chacko arrived in Pittsburgh hired on in no small part due to Dr. Mona Melham, the Associate Chief of Staff. Chacko repaid Melhem’s confidence by filing a series of complaints against Melhem with the VA leadership and IG’s office. In one case, Chacko claimed that Dr. Melhem was putting patients in danger by allowing a radioactive agent called thallium to be used in X rays rather than what she characterized as a safer agent, technetium. The VA Inspector’s office investigated this claim but concluded that “no issues were identified”. Dr. Melhem wasn’t the only one to get in Chacko’s crosshairs. In fact, a significant portion of the radiology staff complained about Chacko citing behavior similar to that cited by Kristi George and Linda Murphy in their complaints.

END of PAGE 1: Continue reading: Dr. Anna Chacko: Problem Magnet or Whistleblower? -Part 1 Pg 2

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