Identification Errors Involving Clinical Laboratories: A College of American Pathologists Q-Probes Study of Patient and Specimen Identification Errors at 120 Institutions

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.