wrong name on the discharge papers

[luvpets]

I feel like such an idiot. I was busy doing a discharge and got an admission at the same time. I unknowingly went into a different patients name and did the discharge paperwork. Of course I changesd all the meds to read the correct meds for the actual patient being discharged. Printed the paper work, patient signed both copies as well as I did and off he went. There was no information about the "wrong" patient on the discharge paper work other than his name and those hospital numbers. Did I violate a HIPPA rule? The nurse that caught what I did wrote up an incident report so of course now my manager wants to talk to me about it.

thanks

[nola1202]

This happened to a good friend of mine and she is a wonderful nurse.

This is more of a process error and if you can make this error so can others,

Think of what you could do next time. I also did this before there were computers and such rigid confidentiality laws. I was horrified, called the

family at home (pediatrics) and told them all the infomation was correct

but I had put the wrong sticky label on the discharge. She said, oh I

never noticed it, but thanks for letting me know. That was it, manager

and charge nurse were notified and they said, well you learned from that, and

showed me a few tips to make sure it didn't happen again. So I say to you

you learned from it, move on.

[Isabelle49]

It's the humans that never admit to making mistakes that scare me.

[turnforthenurse, MSN, NP]

Did those papers also contain things like the MR#? I don't know what your discharge paperwork entails, but ours usually includes education information on what they were there for...such as managing heart failure and what to look for (if they were diagnosed with HF, or as a precaution), etc. In that case, I would think this is a HIPAA violation, because you have patient identifiers + diagnosis/PHI, but maybe I am wrong. I hope someone else can chime in on this.

This is still why you always check and recheck patient identifiers, even with someone such as this. Good luck to you.

[Orange Tree]

I feel like such an idiot. I was busy doing a discharge and got an admission at the same time. I unknowingly went into a different patients name and did the discharge paperwork. Of course I changesd all the meds to read the correct meds for the actual patient being discharged. Printed the paper work, patient signed both copies as well as I did and off he went. There was no information about the "wrong" patient on the discharge paper work other than his name and those hospital numbers. Did I violate a HIPPA rule? The nurse that caught what I did wrote up an incident report so of course now my manager wants to talk to me about it.

thanks

I can't imagine HIPAA being an issue unless you took pictures of the discharge paperwork and posted them on facebook. The label mix-up was definitely a mistake, and something to look out for in the future, but it doesn't sound like anything horrible happened as a result. In other words, you are lucky! And I doubt you'll do the same thing again.

[godbless-yute]

Actually this is a HIPAA violation. The hospital can be fined $500k for this incident. I only know this because the same thing happened at my hospital and the pt didn't handle it as cool as yours did and filed a suit. We all make mistakes, but some of them can be costly.