Austin Failure to Diagnose Lawyers

How Does a Failure to Diagnose Happen?

Doctors can use a number of steps, tools, and equipment to diagnose a patient, such as: 

• Laboratory testing: The key to diagnosing with accuracy in many situations is using laboratory and diagnostic testing methods. Doctors can order x-rays, MRIs, blood tests, etc. to learn more about a patient’s underlying medical condition. If such a test is not available at the doctor’s hospital or clinic, then the patient should be referred to another location that can complete the testing.
• Patient record checks: Useful information about a patient’s condition can sometimes be found in their own medical records and that of their immediate family members. To get a clearer picture of what a patient is going through, a doctor should use any available records to look for signs of a pattern or obvious symptoms of specific health conditions.
• Second opinions: Another important tool available to every medical provider is the help of other doctors. Second opinions from colleagues can be invaluable for diagnosing confounding symptoms or issues that the diagnosing doctor has not encountered before.

Failure to diagnose cases arise when a medical provider fails to take additional, reasonable steps when diagnosing a patient, leading to an inaccurate diagnosis, which might be a complete lack of a diagnosis. What is important to establish is whether or not another doctor in the same situation would have done things differently and to the benefit of the patient. In other words, would a different doctor have reasonably ordered more tests and made a better effort to diagnose the patient? If so, then medical malpractice might have occurred.

What is the Danger in a Failure to Diagnose Situation?

Depending on the symptoms or conditions missed or misunderstood, failure to diagnose a patient accurately could cause severe harm or even become life-threatening. For example, failing to identify cancer symptoms could allow cancer to grow unchecked in a patient’s body to the point that it becomes terminal.

The validity of a failure to diagnose claim also hinges on the danger and harm done by that failure. If a doctor does not diagnose a patient’s condition, but the patient does not suffer any worsened illness or new injury because of it, then the situation likely would not validate a medical malpractice claim. Instead, the patient must have suffered some sort of measurable or noticeable harm due to the failure to diagnose, which then cost them financial damages like increased medical bills or missing wages.