Failure to Diagnose – Utah, Nevada, Wyoming & Idaho

In a failure to diagnose case, there are several things that our Utah attorneys must take into account in order to ensure a fair case. It is important to prove that if the condition was treated in a timely manner, the results would be different.

ATTORNEY JACK D. RAY: When a patient goes to a doctor’s office, they typically have two concerns. One, they want to know what’s wrong with them and two they want it effectively treated. If that first question is not answered accurately or in a timely manner, then an important window of time to effectively treat the condition can pass and can close permanently. As a result, when somebody comes to us and there has been a delay in diagnosing their condition, we have to look at a few different things. First, we have to consider if this is something that the physician should have recognized and second if he had recognized it and treated it appropriately, at the appropriate time, what difference would it have made. Sometimes a delay in diagnosis is something that could have occurred even of the best of circumstances. And sometimes, even when the delay of diagnosis was negligent, the delay really didn’t produce any change in the outcome. So we have to consider both of those. Sometimes, the answers to those questions are very simple and very obvious. However, far more often the answers to those questions are quite complicated and require the expertise of specialists who really focus their practice in a given niche of medicine. We have worked with hundreds of experts throughout the country at major medical institutions over the last 10 to 20 years and so we have established contacts with these individuals and are able to get those questions answered in authoritative manner. And when we are able to bring that kind of expertise to bear in a delaying diagnosis case, then it establishes instant credibility with the medical insurers who are defending the hospitals and the doctors. And we find it far more effective in being able to obtain for the client a better recovery and a more timely recovery.