I recently had x-rays taken at a local Hospital. When I picked up the copies (on disc) and gave them to my Dr. he said they were testicular images from another patient Did the Hospital violate HIPPA?

Perhaps - if the images included information on who the patient was, or if it could be easily inferred, then I would say yes, and the hospital could be at risk for a lawsuit if the person whose images they were finds out about it.

I think ebaines is correct. I just did a lot of research and can find no reference to anyone getting a free pass because it was a clerical error. And I think rightly so, because anyone in the entire medical chain could always claim- 'Well, I was looking at my friend's records by mistake, there happened to be a patient with a similar name, I wasn't snooping' or a thousand different scenarios. I think you should report it. Each medical entity is required to have a policy in place to ensure compliance with HIPAA law and to provide all employees with training to further ensure compliance.
The situation you described almost certainly had to be a violation of in-place procedures, a name wasn't checked, a DOB wasn't checked, etc.
Seems to me that the Dr. should have taken custody of that document/xray and personally returned it to his probably colleagues officially and let them handle it per their written policy.
The responsible employee may be terminated and that is not a bad thing. If not such a glowing error, it might not have been caught and resulted in erroneous treatment, let alone invasion of privacy. Their procedure may even require them to notify the patient whose records were violated. All based on a name being provided with the xray and I doubt seriously that it wasn't.

They clearly violated established procedures. And the person responsible will probably be disciplined. So what do you want out of this? If it upsets you report it!

Just don't think its going to get you a payday... someone will probibly get in trouble... but you won't get any financial rewards from it. Only said that because so many people posting here have actually thought there was money to be had for them in the past.

Thanks to all who replied. I'm not looking for a payday here. But the Hospital's mistake cost me an additional $200 since I had to get another set of x-rays done at a different provider. (The Hospital and Dr. are not in same city). I am hoping to use this as leverage to reduce my Hospital bill, however.

A similar thing happened to my wife - the results from a blood test that were delivered to her doctor were clearly not hers. It took multiple calls to the lab that drew the blood before she finally got them to agree to redo the test for free (we were insistent that they not bill BlueCross/Blue Shield a second time for the rework - that took some doing!). To me this is not really a medical question but rather is a quality issue - if you ordered a book from Amazon and they shipped the wrong one you wouldn't pay to buy it a second time, right? My advice is call the X-ray provider, tell them they screwed up and you need to have the X-rays done again, for free. They'll probably need to talk to your doctor to confirme that a mistake was made.

Edit - on re-reading yor response I see you already had the new X-rays doen by a different provider. Your only recourse then is to ask for a refund for the set they messed up on. You should get a letter from your doctor explaining why it's clearly not yours.

I agree... you should at least get a refund on the x-rays they did take... I assume yours are MIA... and they weren't able to resend the corrrect ones because they counldn't be located. If you never asked them to resend the correct ones....they have a reason to argue against a refund.