68 published accounts of wrong health records from 48 countries and territories
A wrong record, as we file it: the record was wrong, and correcting it was hard or refused.
Published October 2024 to October 2026, found in sources in 30 languages: 68 of all 442 cases. By region, 4 in Africa, 9 in the Americas, 15 in Asia, 33 in Europe, 4 in the Middle East and 3 in Oceania. Of these, a regulator or court decided 26, the organization involved admitted 11, 29 are allegations not decided and 2 are a person's own account. The sources: 12 decisions by regulators and ombudsmen, 2 court judgments, 1 accounts on a parliament's official record and 53 reports by edited news outlets. 12 decisions are known to us from a news report of it. The list last changed on October 7, 2026.
Each case is filed under one kind of problem when it is written, by the rule above; the cases here are the ones filed under it. These cases are not a sample: they show what is published and findable, not how common wrong records are.
Each case's id links its line on Real cases, the one address to cite. Every case, every kind of problem, by country: Real cases.
By month and region
all cases that monthcases filed as record wronga month not yet overevery panel on the same scale, 0 to 15 cases a month
Africa47 cases, 25 countries and territoriesAmericas89 cases, 29 countries and territoriesAsia76 cases, 25 countries and territoriesEurope187 cases, 47 countries and territoriesMiddle East25 cases, 13 countries and territoriesOceania18 cases, 6 countries and territories
Each bar counts the cases whose source was published that month, October 2024 to October 2026, by region. Pick a kind of problem to see its share of each bar. Counts show what was published and what our searches found, not how often problems happen. October 2026 runs only to October 3, 2026, the newest source date, so its bars are drawn as outlines. Every case as a spreadsheet (CSV).
See the numbers
Cases filed as record wrong, by month of the source and by region
Month
Africa
Americas
Asia
Europe
Middle East
Oceania
All
October 2024
0
0
0
1
0
0
1
November 2024
0
1
0
2
0
0
3
December 2024
1
0
0
1
0
0
2
January 2025
1
0
0
0
0
0
1
February 2025
0
1
0
1
0
0
2
March 2025
0
0
2
0
0
0
2
April 2025
0
0
0
2
0
0
2
May 2025
0
0
0
1
1
0
2
June 2025
0
0
0
1
0
0
1
July 2025
1
0
0
0
0
0
1
August 2025
0
0
1
3
0
0
4
September 2025
0
2
0
1
0
0
3
October 2025
0
1
0
1
0
0
2
November 2025
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
December 2025
0
1
1
5
0
0
7
January 2026
0
0
0
2
1
0
3
February 2026
1
0
0
3
1
0
5
March 2026
0
0
1
2
1
1
5
April 2026
0
0
2
0
0
0
2
May 2026
0
0
0
1
0
0
1
June 2026
0
1
1
1
0
0
3
July 2026
0
1
2
2
0
1
6
August 2026
0
0
2
1
0
1
4
September 2026
0
1
2
2
0
0
5
October 2026 (so far)
0
0
1
0
0
0
1
All
4
9
15
33
4
3
68
Cases filed as record wrong, by how settled they are and by region
How settled
Africa
Americas
Asia
Europe
Middle East
Oceania
All
A regulator or court decided
2
2
3
17
2
0
26
The organization admitted the problem
0
1
3
5
0
2
11
Alleged, not decided
2
6
9
9
2
1
29
The person's own account
0
0
0
2
0
0
2
All
4
9
15
33
4
3
68
Cases filed as record wrong, by kind of source and by region
A provincial health department official reported common record faults found across facilities: diagnoses not updated, test results not assessed, sections that contradict each other and orders with no clear link to the patient's condition. No facility was named.
Complaints that electronic records list care patients never received rose 68.75 percent in July and August 2026 over a year earlier. The health fund links the rise to wider use of the eZdrave app.
Prosecutors say former staff of a health insurer took confidential member data and filed 4,363 authorizations for services members never sought. Interviewed members said they never requested, signed or received them.
A court fined a dentist one million won for writing a smaller medication amount in a patient's record than was actually given, and for recording health checks that were never carried out.
A new eZdrave feature asks patients whether they attended each recorded visit. Within weeks they had sent 1,760 reports of exams, test results and hospital stays they did not recognise, and 560 checks had begun.
Police finished an inquiry into medical reports allegedly faked to justify a procedure on a woman at a private hospital in Sindh. The provincial healthcare commission will have experts review all records and hear both sides.
Over 9,000 people flagged more than 24,000 entries in their national health app history as wrong. The ministry told a parliamentary committee about a quarter of checked entries were staff data-entry errors and others reflected performance targets, not care given.
A man said he was never examined, yet a military medical commission certified him fit for service. Asked by the court for the examination file and doctors' findings, the commission produced only the certificate, so the court annulled it.
A patient agreed to have a specialist appointment transcribed by an AI tool. She later found a letter to her GP claimed something she says she never said. After she complained, the specialist apologised and corrected it.
Affected people said their national health app history listed treatments they never had, one with 16 false entries. One said an insurance claim could not proceed. They want false entries deleted in writing and those responsible identified.
A referral was issued in a patient's name on a day she received no care, carrying someone else's health data. Further referrals and reports followed. The regulator fined the hospital, its director and the doctor; a court upheld it.
A patient's X-ray report described the image as normal although a specialist saw clear signs of injury on the film. The diagnostic centre admitted the error, saying it happened while reports were obtained remotely by email.
Another woman's appointments and tests were added to a patient's health record. When the other woman died, police wrongly told the patient's family that the patient had died. Mercy Health apologised.
Relatives searching for people after the earthquakes say hospital patient lists held entries that were not names at all, only question marks or single letters, and that some people lost all trace during transfers between hospitals.
Patients asked a practitioner for their records and did not get them. Before police questioning he created a new electronic file showing one treatment where the original showed three. The court upheld his forgery conviction.
A newspaper reports that a hospital submitted a claim with false bills for care it never gave an insured patient, and repeat claims for one patient, before the Health Insurance Board spotted and rejected them.
Women received text invitations from a clinic they had never used. The clinic blamed a backend fault in an information system shared with other providers, could not say how many people were reached, and said no data left the system.
A patient's family filed a complaint that a clinic's scan report said normal, while three later scans at other centres found a serious problem. The clinic stood by its report; the local health officer promised an investigation.
An audit by the Superintendencia de Salud found that the original entry in a patient's digital clinical record at the social security hospital was deleted and replaced six minutes later with a different account. The regulator identified the user responsible.
A health declaration belonging to one patient was placed in another patient's record ahead of planned care. The error was found later. The region reported it under the serious-incident law, saying the wrong information could have affected safety.
Users of the national health app reported seeing other people's test results in their accounts. One woman said a clinic told her she was recorded as dead and had been removed from its patient list.
A patient's scan report from a diagnostic centre contained entries that contradicted each other, and a doctor reading it gave alarming advice. A repeat test elsewhere found nothing wrong. The centre apologised in writing.
Health NZ acknowledged that two people with near-identical details can be linked to one National Health Index number, and that some may have received the wrong care as a result. It said it keeps no central record of such cases.
The emirate's health regulator closed five facilities and suspended staff pending referral to prosecutors. Inspections found sick notes issued without examining patients and manipulation of medical data, among other licensing violations.
Investigators say a family doctor registered 1,731 patient declarations in the national e-health system without people's knowledge, using altered names, birth dates and addresses, to claim state payments for care never given.
Prosecutors charged 32 people, including hospital operators and doctors, accused of fabricating records and issuing separate bills for patients on one flight to support inflated insurance claims for foreign trekkers.
A health institution uploaded another person's outpatient visit sheet into a patient's national record because they shared a name. The regulator found the record inaccurate and faulted the institution for not reporting the resulting breach.
A clinic recorded a wrong test result for a man that later tests did not support, and acted on it for years. The error surfaced when he applied for a benefit. The High Court found negligence and awarded damages.
A patient complained that a private clinic kept their health insurance card. When it was returned, the discharge papers recorded treatment sessions the national insurer says were fictitious. The insurer applied a contractual penalty to the clinic.
A relative says a hospital lab recorded a test value far outside the normal range. A doctor doubted it and ordered a retest elsewhere, which came back normal, pointing to a broken machine.
Decisions in a government compensation scheme for care given without consent were postponed. The responsible minister said officials must travel around the country to find records, and that records were not always correctly kept.
The national health service said some clinics put inflated or invented entries into patients' electronic records to raise payments, and it ended contracts with several. Patients have reported finding visits in their records that never happened.
A patient in the Algarve asked for a clinical report needed for care abroad. The patient says the hospital then resent an earlier report with only the date changed; the commission told it to check and supply what was missing.
A patient received a test report carrying another person's name and findings, and only learned of the mistake when his doctor pointed it out. The Ministry of Health called this kind of mix-up a serious safety incident.
Pharmacists say drugs dropped from a prescription are often not recorded, so the national e-prescription system shows a complete prescription while the patient received only part of it.
A patient told the parliamentary ombudsman that two doctors entered false information in their health record and that access requests were mishandled. A complaint to the Directorate of Health had been pending for more than three years.
A patient says his first imaging report described the wrong part of the body and a corrected report mentioned a procedure that was never done, suggesting a mix-up with another patient. He says staff told him mistakes happen.
An anonymous staff member at a private health provider told a newspaper that records are often filled in after care and adjusted, so complications are minimised or left out of the patient's record.
The national health insurer said it was investigating about 1,000 suspected ghost patient claims in the Cordillera region, where members were recorded as treated when they were not. Members spotted them after receiving text alerts.
A patient asked a provider to correct data it had sent to the national health system. The provider said the entries were right and would not discuss it. The audit office said this broke the provider's complaints rules.
Checking the national patient portal, a patient found that a family doctor whose list they were not on had recorded a diagnosis and treatment for them. The audit office warned that a misleading history can affect later care decisions.
For years, documents sent to the national system carried a diagnosis code one letter away from the right one, recording an unrelated finding. The audit office noted such errors can mislead treatment and harm a person's reputation and job prospects.
Seeking private insurance, a man opened his electronic patient record and found three diagnoses he says do not apply to him, billed during routine visits. Insurers saw him as high risk. Only the treating doctor can correct them.
A woman found her health insurance file listed an unknown man as her husband. The regulator fined the insurer, which moved 1,708 people onto its books without consent between 2023 and 2025 using invented family records.
A patient found entries in his digital health record showing medicines given in a hospital department he says he never visited. He complained to the hospital, says no clear answer came, and went public. Officials say it is being investigated.
Former doctors told investigative reporters that hospital management entered names of people who were not ill as state-funded patients, inflating patient numbers. The health ministry referred the claims to anti-corruption investigators; management called them absurd.
A formal complaint to the Ministry of Health alleges that staff at a public hospital falsified a patient's records to justify keeping her longer. The Ministry opened an internal review and has not published findings.
A man in the Astrakhan region found his record held a relative's history, entered when the relative was treated under his documents. Another hospital refused him care. The cassation court overturned his damages award, finding the error his own.
While handling a records transfer, a nurse at a health centre registered a visit the patient never made, then deleted it. The regulator accepted the centre's fixes and rejected the complaint as posing no real risk.
Teachers describe paying a bribe to have their required medical record books filled in, and one says a clinic doctor took samples but issued a certificate of normal results two hours later without checking them.
A patient asked a public health centre to amend her health record and heard nothing for two years. The ombudsman found no formal decision had been made and told the centre to decide at once.
Evidence summarised by a parliamentary committee said the national health insurer's own database still held inaccurate patient records, so some hospital claims were rejected because patients' sex was wrongly recorded as male.
Doctors said moving 25 years of patient records into a new system produced missing documents, absent operation notes and wrong dates. The regional health authority confirmed only about half of 200 million documents had been moved.
The health regulator closed four facilities that sold sick leave over a messaging app, collecting ID photos and health details, then recorded visits that never happened in people's medical files and forged consent signatures.
A survey of 1,800 adults for the patient watchdog found 23% had noticed mistakes or gaps in their NHS records, including wrong personal details, wrong medication and conditions they never had. Most said the errors caused problems.
A clinic emailed a patient a lab report with a serious finding that was false. The city health committee confirmed a template error and reprimanded the doctor; the clinic apologised and a court awarded damages.
A private provider filled in a patient's file with an address taken from the electoral register, years out of date. Despite repeated requests it did not correct it, and medical reports reached the current occupants. Fines totalled €20,000.
After a patient died in hospital, the commission found staff had, as a routine practice, recorded a doctor as giving orders that the doctor never gave. It referred hospital staff to prosecutors and recommended changes to the law.
An outlet reports that a private clinic's laboratory gave a patient an incorrect negative test result. The Ministry of Health responded that screening results outside the specialist centre must be confirmed there.
On a monitoring visit, the Public Defender's team found the clinic's patient files held almost no entries and often lacked lab results and specialist notes. It tied the gaps to overworked doctors and staff shortages.
A patient told El Watan that a first laboratory reported an alarming test result. Repeat tests at two other laboratories did not confirm it, and she concluded the first result was an error.
Prosecutors named a doctor as a suspect for entering at least 22 false appointment records over two years for women who had never met him. The women discovered the entries themselves and went to police.
In a negligence case, the High Court found a nurse had shaded over an original entry on a patient's form instead of striking it out. It accepted this was human error and dismissed the claims.
A patient found a specialist appointment he never requested in his digital health record. The public insurer said a clerk mistyped an ID number, cancelled the appointment and said it has no statistics on similar errors.
Within days of a large region switching record systems, staff reported record information that was missing or disappeared, plus failures registering and finding patients. The region reported the system to the medical products regulator and paused it.
A patient said a hospital put a report in her electronic health record without telling her. When she asked for it to be hidden, the system created a replacement dated the day of the change. The regulator issued a warning.
Insured people using the eZdrave app found medical activities in their electronic records that had never been carried out. After checks, the national health fund imposed fines, partly ended contracts and recovered money paid.