I’m fairly certain that my chart/data was recently mixed up with another person’s. What are the chances that this actually happened, given the following info? Is there a credible chance or is this truly one of those “only in soap operas and as a convenient plot device” things?
I went in for a sleep study to attempt to diagnose sleep apnea. I am not obese, but rather just up and stop breathing while falling asleep. There was one other person doing a sleep study in the center that night - an older obese man.
Several weeks later I get my results back and go over them with my doctor, and he reads off that “there was no significant sign of apnea, but that there was severe snoring.” Now, this strikes me as very strange because I distinctly remember doing the “wake up gasping for breath just as I’m nodding off” thing while at the sleep study, and I do not snore - ever. Ever ever ever. It’s simply not a thing that I ever do, even once, according to my wife. Not during naps, not at night. Not with a cold. Ever.
Now, the other guy was sawing logs the second the study started. I mean, I could hear it through the wall between the two rooms, like a chainsaw. Like an espresso machine on overdrive. The definition of “severe snoring.” And from what I heard (I had no choice!), he never did the sort of classic “stop snoring for a while, then catch up” thing that sleep apnea patients tend to do.
I told my doctor how weird this was, but he just sort of shrugged.
What do you think? Anyone work in the sort of fringes of medical testing or lab work who can vouch that something like this could have easily happened? Any advice for getting it corrected or at least looking into it? I don’t imagine the lab is going to just give any info if I call them up.
All I can suggest is, if you have insurance that’s paying for this testing, call them and speak with a patient advocate or ombudsman and explain the situation. The doctor’s office will respond to an insurance company’s query with more enthusiasm, almost guaranteed.
Of course it could happen. A few years ago my mom passed out and we brought her to the ER. After a couple of hours, the doctor came in and started telling us that she’d had a massive stroke and had significant damage. Then he realized that, no, he had the chart for the lady in the next cubicle. My mom just had some out-of-whack electrolytes.
Record mixups are pretty easy. If your tests were going on at the same time, were related to the same subject, and had the same doctor, MA, or nurse on the case then it’s highly possible. Find out who the records admin at the office is and request to see yours - inconsistencies in the records should be grounds for a review.
To echo Alice, if the insurance company is paying for this, have your agent initiate a records review SPECIFIC TO THIS CASE. For the love of Og don’t give them free reign to plow through anything and everything they want. You’ll never see the end of it.
My hospital just released it’s internal report on patient care errors for the last quarter. There were, IIRC, six errors involving charting – writing data on the wrong chart, reading data from the wrong chart, etc. These are the errors they caught through various error checking procedures – there’s no way to know how many weren’t caught.
It happened to me when I was in college. I was called and told that the doctor needed to see me. I had just had a blood test and this was a rather frightening response. The caller would tell me nothing. A short time after we had hung up, she called me back to say that there had been a mistake and I didn’t need to come in. She explained that the other person whose test had come back with mine had what appeared to be lukemia. (This was in the 1960s when medical assistants weren’t so discreet.)
Even if you have to pay for it yourself, sleep apnea is dangerous enough that you will want to be absollutely certain that the results are correct. My doctor told me that it is almost always the wives who notice that the husbands snore and stop breathing. But if you don’t snore, you may be the only one to notice that you have to gasp for breath.
Ah yes, the infamous German doctor story:
I was in my 20’s and went for a checkup. Doctor said I had syphilis.
“No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”
“Yes you do.” he said.
I thought over the past few months and said, “No I don’t.”
“Yes you do.” he repeated.
So, I get the first shot…it didn’t hurt but the next day it felt like a VW had hit me in the butt and I limped for two days.
Went back after a week and got the second shot. Again, major pain the following day.
Go back for my third and final shot.
Nurse, “So, Mr. DMarkus, the doctor will be with you in a minute.”
“Uh, my name is DMark.”
She looked at the chart, then dashed into the doctor’s office. I heard some loud conversation behind the door and the nurse came back out.
“So, Mr. DMark…the doctor says you do not need the third shot after all.”
Yep, someone with a similar name had been running around Berlin with syphilis, probably fucking like a bunny, while I was living the life of a cloistered monk, limping around the city, needlessly, for the past two weeks. I was mighty pissed off.
I have a very unusual last name. I went to see my internist, at the same medical center I work at. The nurse called my name, mangling it but recognizable enough that it was definitely mine. She weighed me on a scale in the hallway, wrote it in the chart, then put me in a room. At some point after the door was closed to the room, the chart was put in a bin mounted outside. The doctor eventually came in, taking the chart from the bin as she did so, opened it and sat down, looked in the chart, and asked to confirm if I was there for pre-surgical clearance? I said “nooooo…” and she looked at me, looked at the chart - not me. I don’t know when the mixup happened, maybe it was removed after I went in the room and replaced improperly, I don’t know.
This is why in my job I try to confirm birth date as well as name, try to confirm what we’re doing with the patient that day, keep close track of the chart, etc.
My wife was once asked by a nurse at a GP’s office how things were going following her operation for testicular cancer. My wife’s response is unprintable. Needless to say, the nurse not only had the wrong file but clearly was not paying any attention to her patients.
The wife (later, elsewhere) also had someone else’s antenatal records mixed up with hers - it took the staff ages to separate the two files.
My husband was given a pair of glasses made to his father’s prescription. They have the same name. They *don’t *have the same prescription. It took him a week and a trip to the eye doctor to get the glasses place to admit their mistake and remake the glasses.
During a recent trip to a new doctor, I happen to look at the prescription I had been given while checking out and noticed that my last name was missing a letter. Oh, and the middle initial is wrong. Hmm, and that birthdate doesn’t look quite right either. Had I not been given a prescription I would have never noticed that they had pulled the wrong file. I can just imagine what fun that would have been straightening out with the insurance company.
Oh hell, even without mixing up the files, they screw up.
I had a sleep study some years back, and among other things, the diagnosis was “hypnotic dependent syndrome”. This is related to long-term use of sleeping pills - either they lose their effect, or you have rebound insomnia, I forget which.
Trouble is, at that point in my life I had used sleeping pills precisely once. One night, that is. When I was in the hospital prior to my daughter’s birth. Three years earlier.
To the best of my knowledge, one night does not trigger such a syndrome, especially not 3 years later :rolleyes:.
It did not give me great confidence in the other findings (and yes, I did later have another study, elsewhere).
If there were two of you in there that night and they did actually swap your records, then the place had a 100% failure rate, at least that night. That’s a little scary.
Not sure if this is close enough to the OP to ask, but how likely do you think it is that a hospital could accidentally swap newborn babies? Years ago my wife gave birth to our 2nd child, a daughter. It was a C-section, and they brought me in when it was over; I saw the screaming little bundle of joy when she was on the scale, then saw my wife, then they stitched her up as I sat by her head, then they sent me out so they could finish up. Soon they wheeled her into a recovery room where I met her, then they wheeled out a little bassinette with the baby. My first thought was, is that the same baby? It was hard to tell b/c she was asleep at the time, and the only time I had seen her was when she was red-faced and screaming.
As she grew, it was obvious that while our firstborn clearly resembles me and my wife in different ways, the younger sister doesn’t look a thing like either of us. Different body type, different facial features, different personality traits. Of course I love her and I couldn’t bear the thought of giving her up, I occasionally wonder, is she really ours? Is there a kid out there that was born in the same hospital that morning who looks like us?
I had an ultrasound and the report mentioned my gallbladder which I no longer have. They said it was probably a cut and paste from another report and they failed to delete the gallbladder part. They went back and looked at my images again to make sure that the rest of the report was OK and it was.
corkboard- now hospitals will put arm and leg bands on the baby as soon as they are born so the chance of a mixup is basically zero. The bands are put on when the baby is still with the mother. Also mom and dad get arm bands for the baby and you cannot take the baby home unless the bands match. This has been the practice for at least 20 years.
It does happen. Humans make mistakes. Record mix-ups are easy mistakes to make, unless you’re very careful. (Remember this the next time you get annoyed because your hospital or clinic verifies your name/dob 95 times per visit.)
Really, medical people generally want to help their patients, not muck with them. However, they can get defensive when attacked.
Personally, I’d start with the sleep center. Call and ask for the clinic manager. Explain your concerns to him/her and ask to come in and review your chart with them. Don’t be all pissy, this is most likely an honest mistake. Honey/vinegar and all that - make them want to help you.
If that doesn’t work, I’d try again with your doctor. Call and talk to the nurse, find out the best to way handle it. Maybe make an appt specifically to discuss this issue. On general principle, I’d start looking for another doctor if he’s not willing to pay attention to your concerns or do anything to help.
I’d reserve the insurance company option for last, but escalate it to them if you can’t get your problem satisfactorily resolved on your own.
Yes, I was just coming in here to amend my previous suggestion to contact the insurance company. The best thing would be to call and speak with the clinic manager, first, I agree. Don’t say in the message anything about a mixup, just say you want to speak with her regarding your visit (lest they preemptively attempt to cover their ass).
It has definitely happened. These days they do bracelets (as another poster mentioned) but depending on when your child was born, it might not have been the practice.