Sometimes, hospital staff confuse two patients for one another, or pull the wrong chart for a patient due to similar sounding names or illnesses. These patient identification errors can cause serious harm, and they’re more common in hospitals than they should be.
A new report from patient safety organization ECRI Institute discusses the issue of misidentifying patients in hospitals.
According to the report, ECRI analyzed errors and near-misses submitted by healthcare organizations to determine the extent to which issues involving identification occurred in facilities.
