You trust your doctors and nurses with your health. Most medical professionals are highly trained and dedicated, but diagnostic errors still happen all too often.
When doctors miss or incorrectly identify serious conditions like cancer, stroke or heart attack, the consequences can be devastating for you and your family. In legal terms, this failure to meet the expected level of care is often called “malpractice.”
Defining diagnostic mistakes
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) reports nearly 800,000 Americans die or become permanently disabled each year due to these errors. Diagnostic failures usually fall into one of three critical categories. Each type can lead to severe injury or death:
- Failure to diagnose: This occurs when your provider completely misses a condition, despite your symptoms or test results indicating its presence. For example, they might ignore a visible mass on a scan, allowing cancer to grow unchecked.
- Misdiagnosis: Here, your doctor diagnoses you with the wrong illness, which results in incorrect treatment and delays the vital care you truly need. A typical example is mistaking life-threatening heart attack symptoms for simple acid reflux.
- Delayed diagnosis: In this situation, the correct diagnosis is eventually found, but only after a significant delay, which can worsen your outlook and make your necessary treatment much less effective, such as waiting six months to diagnose an aggressive tumor.
For any of these to be medical malpractice, the provider’s actions must have violated the accepted “standard of care.”
When care falls short
Bringing a medical malpractice claim requires you to prove four essential elements that your care fell below the legal standard:
- A doctor-patient relationship existed.
- The doctor failed to act as a reasonably competent provider would have under the same circumstances.
- This failure directly led to your injury or made your existing condition worse.
- You suffered measurable losses, such as new medical bills or lost wages, because of the injury.
Because medical issues are complex, you must get supporting testimony from other medical professionals to prove a breach of the standard of care.
Taking action in Louisiana
If a diagnostic error harms you or a loved one, you need to act quickly. Louisiana law sets strict deadlines and requirements you must follow. Vital steps include:
- Securing medical records: Immediately gather all records related to your original diagnosis and the subsequent treatment you received.
- Consulting an attorney promptly: Louisiana law sets a one-year statute of limitations from the date of the “alleged act, omission, or neglect,” or one year from the date of discovery, and an absolute three-year statute of repose from the date of the act. Critically, the one-year prescriptive period is legally suspended (tolled) from the date a request is filed with the medical review panel (MRP) until 90 days after the panel issues its opinion.
In Louisiana, filing a claim with the MRP is a mandatory procedural step for all malpractice lawsuits against a qualified health care provider, unless the provider agrees to waive the panel review. This step must be completed or waived before a civil lawsuit can proceed in court.
The clock on your claim is running, so do not wait to seek legal help. Medical malpractice cases are incredibly complex and heavily defended by health care organizations and their insurers. A skilled medical malpractice attorney is essential to receive the compensation and justice you deserve.