Oregon woman awarded $18.6 million after Equifax failed to fix errors on her credit report

[SheilaT]

74. Yes, they are.

But what I observed was an equal careless on the part of Junior and Senior themselves.

On this theme of same names, several years ago I was doing the outpatient registration for a patient at the hospital I work at. Verified his name, date of birth, and residence. He'd moved. I fixed it. Then I said, "This person is your wife." He said, "No, that's my brother's wife".

It took a few minutes for me to understand that he and his brother had the same English first name. They're members of a native American Pueblo here in New Mexico. Their Indian names, the ones they used in everyday life were different. But same first name, DOB, and address for much of their lives. Fortunately they did have different Social Security numbers, so I was unable to untangle their records. But if I had not happened to mention the wife's name, and there was actually no good reason for me to have done so, he'd have wound up having this test/procedure hopelessly intermingled with his brother's records.

So it's not always the employees who screw it up.

Here in New Mexico there's a huge problem because of a dearth of Hispanic surnames, and nearly the same dearth of first names. More than once we will have two people with the same first and last names in as patients. If they're at least five years apart in age, I can figure out who it is the person wanting to visit should go to. But you'd be surprised how many people have no idea how old someone is to within the correct decade. Last week we had two, I'll say Juan Lopez because that's NOT the name, who were the exact same age.