Malpractice Lawsuits Against Radiologists

 Most lawsuits against radiologists - 75% - are the result of a failure to diagnose or communciate any concerns in a test to the patient in a timely manner. To be sure, radiologists have a tough job and a missing an abnormality is not necessarily malpractice. But, far too often, radiologists miss evidence of disease that a normal prudent radiologist would not miss. There are two general types of radiologist mistakes:

Preception Errors

Perception error is a fancy term for when the radiologist fails to see what is there to be seen. Radiology is a skill. Some are simply better at it than others although the reality is that even a good radiologist can fail to see a positive finding on a x-ray, mammogram, MRI, or CT-scan. Repetition also helps sometimes. If a doctor is reading one MRI a month, the doctor is not likely to have the same ability as someone who is regularly reading and interpreting MRIs.

This is an interesting statistic on radiology malpractice. If radiologists are given a stack of radiographic, CT, or MRI studies that have abnormalities, approximately 30% of the abnormalities will be missed. But when you add in a lot of tests with no evidence of disease, the radiologist's overall miss rate drops 90%.

Communication Errors

With the exception of mammograms, the standard of care does not require radiologists to communciate directly with a patient.  But while direct communciation is not required, radiologist can't stop at just dictating a report and not making sure that the patient and/or referring doctor have been notified. Communciation error radiology claims are usually larger cases not because the damages are higher than in a straight misdiagnosis case but because juries can really get their mind around how little was needed to make sure information was properly communicated so the patient could get the treatement he/she needs.

 

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