Dan Casey reports:
Richard Beason’s fax machine works pretty hard, spitting out documents regularly. One that came in July 13 was from a Roanoke cardiology office. He read part of that to me over the phone.
“Patient has been complaining of fatigue and daytime somnolence,” it reads. “We have obtained nocturnal pulse oximetry.”
[…]
Beason gazes at these papers with no small amount of wonder. To him, they all might as well be written in Greek. His business isn’t medicine; it’s numbers. For 40 years, he’s worked as a certified public accountant. His office is in his Botetourt County home.
Read more on Roanoke.com. This is actually a pretty detailed article about how entities attempt to prevent such errors and how the recipient tried to track down the source of such problems so as to put a halt to it.
Read the whole thing and then think about what you think should be done to address this repeated problem.
These should be treated as HIPPA violations and violators fined accordingly, perhaps also with some percentage of the fine going to the reporter (in this case Beason).