Frequency and clinical importance of pages sent to the wrong physician.

E ffective communication between health care providers is essential to patient safety and quality of care. A retrospective study of 14 000 admissions found that communication failures were the most common cause of preventable disability or death and were nearly twice as common as those due to inadequate medical skill. A major type of communication failure is sending a page to the wrong physician. Prior studies have described paging problems such as paging the wrong physician, unanswered pages, and delayed responses but do not quantify the extent of the problem. Our primary aim was to quantify the frequency of pages sent to the wrong physician in 2 academic teaching hospitals and to examine the potential clinical importance of these errors.