Throwaway for obvious reasons.
Pretty sure this scenario is common enough to not trigger HIPPA. I recently took care of a patient’s emergent surgical needs. The source of their surgical emergency was later determined to be a cancer, which by now is widely metastatic and terminal.
They had a CT scan in my shop a year ago. The CT shows an obvious finding related to this tumor, as well as the tumor itself. It’s a finding that a reasonably trained rad should not miss. This is an obvious miss that in my opinion is below the standard of care in the community we are in. This was not a perceptive error that can occur when a rad is fatigued or working too fast as the reader actually commented on the associated finding in their report but for some reason failed to search for the tumor or even suggest that this associated finding should be worked up as it is essentially pathonomic for this particular type of tumor.
This tumor looked resectable on imaging a year ago. Patient is fairly young.
Now I’ve seen a lot of stuff in health care, having been in many places like all of us have, but this kind of stuff make my blood boil still. There’s seem to be an unspoken role of not putting colleagues under the bus and I get it and I definitely take the benefit of the doubt for most things (more so than average I would say).
But for this case my conscience want me to tell the patient or family that in fact her tumor has been missed and it could have been treatable. Though this finding is obvious, it’s not apparent unless you are a specialist who are used to review your own scans. I have no doubt that if people want to this can be “swept under the rug” but it wouldn’t be the right thing to do. Obviously this would place myself under a microscope as well as I actually did do work on her but my work has been routine and for this kind of situation I honestly cannot stand. What if it’s my or your family? Unacceptable.
Reddit, what do you think?
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