Misidentified laboratory specimens may cause patient injury, but their frequency in general laboratory practice is unknown.
To determine (1) the frequency of identification errors detected before and after result verification, (2) the frequency of adverse patient events due to specimen misidentification, and (3) factors associated with lower error rates and better detection of errors.
One hundred twenty clinical laboratories provided information about identification errors during 5 weeks.
In aggregate, 85% of errors were detected before results were released; one quarter of laboratories identified more than 95% of errors before result verification. The overall rate of patient identification errors involving released results was 55 errors per 1,000,000 billable tests. A total of 345 adverse events were reported. Most of the adverse events caused material inconvenience to the patients but did not result in any permanent harm. On average, adverse events resulted from 1 of every 18 identification errors. Extrapolating the adverse event rate observed in this study to all United States hospital-based laboratories suggests that more than 160,000 adverse events per year result from misidentification of patients' laboratory specimens.
Identification errors are common in laboratory medicine, but most are detected before results are released, and only a fraction are associated with adverse patient events. Even when taking into consideration the design of this study, which used imperfect case finding, institutions that did a better job of detecting errors within the laboratory released a smaller proportion of results that involved specimen misidentification.