Support Your Case with an Emergency Room Expert Witness
Any number of situations can arise that will lead to a lawsuit and the need for an emergency room expert witness.
Emergency Room (ER) medicine is a medical specialty that manages acute, critical, and urgent health issues. Patients visit the ER for life-threatening symptoms, including:
- Accidents: falls, motor vehicle accidents
- Allergic reactions
- Bleeding: contusions, cuts, and impact injuries
- Broken bones and sprains
- Foreign objects in the body
- Infections: skin, upper respiratory
- Neurological symptoms: collapsing, dizziness, falls, headaches, numbness, stroke
- Pain: abdominal, back, chest, tooth
- Seizures
- Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing
Emergency room care includes the initial patient stabilization and treatment of acute health issues. When a patient arrives at an ER, an evaluation that includes the patient’s current condition and medical history occurs in “triage.” The stages of triage are:
- Resuscitation (immediate life-saving intervention)
- Emergency
- Urgent
- Semi- or non-urgent
This triage system determines the allocation of treatment by priority. The triage level may or may not be accurate based on the patient’s initial presentation, and a delay in care may occur. This delay can result in a negative outcome for the patient.
Because the ER is of an urgent nature, doctors may make quick decisions based on inaccurate or incomplete information. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), ER doctors see 50% of patients for less than 15 minutes. Rapid decisions may make the patient vulnerable to an incorrect diagnosis. Although not meant to harm, these decisions may cause human error in the patient’s care.
Common emergency room errors include:
- Delayed diagnosis
- Delayed testing or treatment
- Discharged home without adequate examination or testing
- Failure to admit as an inpatient for further workup
- Failure to adequately investigate the patient’s medical history
- Failure to complete a full examination
- Misdiagnosis
- Misinterpretation of labs or diagnostic results
ER visits are highly complex, and any deviation in the standard of care by a physician could have dire outcomes for the patient.
Selecting the most knowledgeable emergency room expert witness is crucial to litigation and invaluable testimony. The expert can determine if the standard of care was breached or if the complication arose for other reasons.
Cambridge Medical Experts can assist you in locating a prominent Ivy League physician to analyze emergency room cases. Malpractice can be accurately identified to achieve the best outcomes.
Our elite team of board-certified emergency room providers have vast experience and are authorities in their specialties. As actively practicing doctors, their medical insight is formidable.
