How common is it that a patient will list a medical office as their address?

I work for a hospital as a finance analyst for clinical trials. I have the ability to work remotely, but I prefer to work in the office. The result is that I have the duty of checking the department mail.

On a regular basis, I get mail for patients that were shipped to my department. My hospital is a big medical campus with multiple locations, so I frequently get mail from other departments to their own patients but with our address. It’s clear that the label was autogenerated in a mass produced batch of letters. So the system simply printed the address that was listed for the patient.

Since the patient is not a patient of my department, I don’t look them up in EMR to see if there is a different address to forward the mail to. Not only is that potentially a HIPAA issue, it would also just be too time consuming to do that given the number of letters I get. I simply put “RETURN TO SENDER” on the letter and toss it in the mail.

But it has me wondering why so many patients have my office’s address listed in their EMR.

Any thoughts?

submitted by /u/Flibity_flobity
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