Atlee Hall recently secured a plaintiff’s verdict via binding arbitration in a case filed against a local health care system for medical negligence.
The case involved a sonographer’s failure to identify a major limb abnormality during a patient’s 20-week ultrasound. Not only did the sonographer fail to identify the abnormality, but the reviewing physician, a maternal fetal medicine specialist, also failed to do so.
Through our well-qualified radiology expert, we were able to establish that this abnormality was missed because the sonographer mislabeled the ultrasound images as showing the left limb, when in fact, they showed only the right limb. As a result, the left limb abnormality went undetected and unreported to the patient.
We consulted with a radiology expert to determine why the abnormality was missed.
The abnormality was missed because the ultrasound images were mislabeled, showing the incorrect limb. Both the sonographer and reviewing physician failed to catch this, and the abnormality was not detected.
Our client suffered severe emotional distress because the infant’s major limb abnormality was not identified or reported. In arbitration, we were able to establish our client’s entitlement to pain and suffering damages.
After building a case proving the sonographer and reviewing physician were negligent, the arbitrator awarded a significant financial settlement to the patient.
The Arbitrator found that the health care system’s employees who interpreted the ultrasound were negligent and that such negligence was a factual cause of the plaintiff’s emotional distress, awarding her damages to compensate her for the anguish that she suffered.