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In recent years, shortages of all sorts of drugs — anesthetics, painkillers, antibiotics, cancer treatments — have become the new normal in American medicine. The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists currently lists inadequate supplies of more than 150 drugs and therapeutics, for reasons ranging from manufacturing problems to federal safety crackdowns to drugmakers abandoning low-profit products. But while such shortages have periodically drawn attention, the rationing that results from them has been largely hidden from patients and the public. (Fink, 1/29)

Identifying patients correctly is one of a health provider’s most basic functions. Get it wrong, and anything from a billing mistake to a catastrophic medical error may follow. Yet in the United States, hospitals and medical practices routinely mix up identities — or, more generally, fail to match the all right records with a patient. Nationally, according to a study from the RAND Corporation, health providers mismatch patients and records 8 percent of the time on average. (McQuaid, 1/28)