Wilkes-Barre Failure to Diagnose Lawyers

Failure to Diagnose Lawyers Serving Wilkes-Barre, Scranton & Northeastern Pennsylvania

Most medical malpractice cases are not about a dramatic mistake in an operating room. They are about a diagnosis that came too late: chest pain sent home as reflux, dizziness called an inner-ear problem hours before a stroke, a shadow on a chest X-ray that no one followed up, a lump that was "probably nothing" until it was stage III. When a doctor, emergency department, radiologist or practice in Wilkes-Barre, Scranton or anywhere in Luzerne, Lackawanna or Dauphin County misses what a careful provider would have caught, Pennsylvania law lets the patient, or the family, hold them accountable.

These cases have three common forms. A missed diagnosis means the condition was never identified. A wrong diagnosis means the patient was treated for something else while the real illness progressed. A delayed diagnosis means the right answer came, but after the window for the best treatment had closed. In each one, the question is the same: what would a reasonably careful provider in that specialty have done, and what did the delay cost?

PA Attorney Source is a Wilkes-Barre firm. Every inquiry is reviewed by a licensed Pennsylvania attorney, and the first step in a diagnosis case is always the same: get the complete records, including the imaging, the lab results and the notes from each visit, in front of a physician in the right specialty. For the wider rules on Pennsylvania malpractice claims, see our medical malpractice lawyer page.

Conditions That Are Commonly Missed or Diagnosed Late

Any condition can be missed. These are the ones where a delay most often turns a treatable problem into a permanent one:

How Diagnostic Errors Happen

The records usually show exactly where the process broke down. The most common failures:

• The right test was never ordered. The symptoms called for imaging, bloodwork or a referral, and the patient was sent home without it.
• A result was misread. A radiologist or pathologist missed a finding a careful specialist would have reported.
• An abnormal result went nowhere. The finding was reported, but it never reached the patient or the ordering doctor never acted on it.
• The obvious answer was the only answer. The provider settled on a benign explanation without ruling out the dangerous possibilities that the symptoms required them to consider.
• No referral or follow-up. A specialist consult, repeat test or follow-up visit that the standard of care required never happened.
• History ignored. Family history, prior results or risk factors in the chart were not taken into account.

What You Have to Prove in Pennsylvania

Like every malpractice claim, a failure to diagnose case requires a duty (you were the provider's patient), a breach of the standard of care, causation and damages. Causation is where these cases are won or lost, because the provider did not create the disease.

Pennsylvania handles that with the increased risk of harm rule. In Hamil v. Bashline (1978), the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that when expert testimony shows a provider's negligence increased the risk of the harm the patient actually suffered, the jury may decide whether that negligence was a substantial factor in causing it (Restatement (Second) of Torts § 323(a)). The plaintiff does not have to prove that earlier treatment would certainly have worked.

Under Pennsylvania's MCARE Act, the expert must generally be a licensed physician who is actively practicing or teaching, or was within the last five years, and who practices in the same or a similar specialty as the defendant. Finding the right expert, a radiologist to judge a radiologist or an emergency physician to judge an emergency physician, is the foundation of the case.

Compensation in a Failure to Diagnose Case

How a Failure to Diagnose Claim Proceeds