Doctors and other medical providers are legally required to uphold the medical community’s accepted standards of care, including informing patients about their medical condition and the results of diagnostic tests. Unfortunately, doctors sometimes are negligent, cut corners, or allow important tasks to slip through the cracks.
When an administrative error or doctor oversight occurs, and you don’t receive your test results, it could be actionable medical malpractice if the error caused you harm, such as a worsened medical outcome, more advanced disease, or more aggressive treatment requirement due to the delay. In the event an oversight with your doctor occurred and caused you harm, contact our medical malpractice lawyer in Chicago today for a free consultation.
Doctors and the facilities they work for or within are often busy and overscheduled workplaces. They may be understaffed, have high staff turnover rates, or have inexperienced employees. Still, medical professionals are required, under their legal duty of care, to have protocols and procedures in place to ensure they carry out all aspects of their duty to properly care for a patient. In spite of these required protocols and practices, doctors may fail to inform a patient of their test results due to the following:
Under rules implemented by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), patients have the right to receive their lab test results directly from the pathology lab, including labs held under HIPAA law; however, this should not be necessary if the doctor upholds their legal standard of care and keeps their patient informed and involved in their medical status and healthcare decisions.
Failure to relay test results in a timely manner constitutes a diagnostic error in medical malpractice law, accounting for about 40% of claims.
Unfortunately, many patients assume that “no news is good news” and believe their test results must be normal if they haven’t heard back from their physician. This is a misunderstanding of the standard of care, which requires all medical providers to inform their patients of their test results, including normal results.
Instead, in some cases, a doctor fails to inform their patient of abnormal test results that require further investigation or an appointment with a specialist. Sadly, common outcomes of these failures include the following:
Failing to inform a patient about test results can cause serious permanent harm or even deadly consequences. A patient or their surviving family member has the right to file a medical malpractice claim or medical malpractice-wrongful death claim against the negligent doctor.
When communication failures lead to more advanced disease with physical and financial consequences, these losses constitute damages in a medical malpractice claim against the negligent provider who failed to adhere to the medical community’s required standard of care.
While a successful claim doesn’t erase the harm caused to you, it can recover common damages such as medical expenses, future medical expenses, out-of-pocket costs, lost earnings, and compensation for non-economic damages, like pain, suffering, and catastrophic permanent injury.
A successful claim also achieves financial accountability and acts as a deterrent to the negligent provider while giving a medical malpractice victim a sense of justice for their trauma.
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