Patient mix-ups happen more often than you think. 

Why the easy fix isn't easy at all. 

Written by John McQuaid, reporting for STAT News

"A California hospital misidentified a patient and harvested his organs, though he had never agreed to donate them. A Rhode Island hospital misidentified a suspect police brought to its emergency room complaining of chest pains. It billed another man with the same name - who also got a call from the suspect's lawyer asking why he'd been arrested. A new mother requested her placenta to take home, then learned it had been given to another patient when a nurse mixed up labels. 

Identifying patients correctly is one of a health provider's most basic functions. Get it wrong, and anything from a billing mistake to a catastrophic medical error may follow. Yet in the United States, hospitals and medical practices routinely mix up identities - or, more generally, fail to match all the right records with a patient. Nationally, according to a study from the RAND Corporation, health providers mismatch patients and records 8 percent of the time on average."