Table 1.

List of common errors occurring in a radiology unit, with description, level of associated risk, and notes regarding the relative critical issues

No.	Error category	Description	Level of associated clinical risk	Notes
1	Patient personal data variation/merge	The same patient is admitted twice in the system, with 2 different patient IDs assigned to him/her	The risk is medium	The referral needs to be informed in order to re-evaluate patient studies on the basis of integrated (merged) information/studies available. The presence of automatic merge procedure must be carefully assessed and controlled
2	Assign images/study to another patient and episode	Images/studies are associated to another—wrong patient.	The risk is very high	It is important to highlight this in real time to all the users and to fix it as soon as possible in order to prevent any inopportune patient treatment. The referral needs to be informed in order to re-evaluate the image on the basis of previous information/studies available
3	Assign images/study to another episode for the same patient	The image sent to PACS is referred (accession number) to the wrong episode/access	The risk is high	It is important to highlight this in real time to all the users and to fix it as soon as possible. The referral needs to be informed in order to re-evaluate the image on the basis of previous information/studies available
4	Wrong image projection/laterality	The image sent to PACS is not properly identified in terms of laterality or projection type (e.g., the AP instead of PA)	The risk is very high	It is important to highlight this in real time to all the users and to fix it as soon as possible in order to prevent any inopportune patient treatment.