Not giving your baby a name right away could increase the risk for medical mistakes

When babies are born in hospitals, ID bracelets are quickly slapped on their tiny wrists and feet, whether their parents have decided on a name or not — and that could lead to terrible mistakes being made to newborns stuck with generic monikers like Babygirl Smith and Babyboy Jones.

In a paper published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, the authors say that entering multiple babies into the computer system with these nondescript names could lead to a greater likelihood of mix-ups when it comes to medical care, especially in the neonatal intensive care unit. "All neonatologists know this is a problem, but weren't able to quantify it," study author Jason Adelman, an internist and public safety officer at New York's Montefiore Health System, told NPR.

Adelman and his colleagues decided to come up with a new naming convention, and instead of calling a baby born to Jane Smith Babygirl Smith, she became Janesgirl Smith. Then, researchers looked at retract-and-reorder events, a tool used in hospital computer systems to mark medical orders retracted by a health care worker and then placed on a different patient shortly thereafter. They found a 36 percent decline in retract-and-reorder events in the year after they tried the new naming convention compared to an earlier time period. Although the tool only measures close calls and not actual errors, doctors say the research is shedding light on an important issue. "The way we name babies in the hospital has to really be thought of very carefully," Dr. Gautham Suresh said.

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