New York Misdiagnosis Attorney

A simple delayed diagnosis or even a misdiagnosis is not enough in itself to prove a doctor was negligent. Skilled and competent doctors still make diagnostic errors throughout the course of their care. True negligence stems from action or inaction that deviates from the standard of care. In other words, a negligent doctor may fail to do something that a reasonably skillful doctor would not, under the same or similar circumstances.

In a suspected case of medical malpractice due to misdiagnosis, the legal team representing the injured patient talks to a similarly trained physician and asks them to complete a “differential diagnosis.” This is a systematic method physicians use to identify and assign a probability to possible diagnoses. In other words, an injured patient must show that a physician with similar pedigree and training would have included the true diagnosis in their differential diagnosis.

A healthcare provider may commit negligence by failing to order proper diagnostic tests, failure to refer to the appropriate specialist, or even failure to diagnose a related condition. Misdiagnosis errors are most common in emergency room settings, where less common conditions are more likely to be misdiagnosed. Up to 57% of children under the age of 12, for example, receive a delay in, or misdiagnosis of, appendicitis in emergency department settings.