Failure to Diagnose Infection

Failure to diagnose an infection refers to a clinical situation in which a physician, nurse practitioner, or other healthcare provider fails to recognize, investigate, or treat an active infection when the patient's signs and symptoms should have prompted a diagnosis — and that failure results in patient harm.

Infectious diseases range from nuisance conditions (urinary tract infections) to rapidly lethal emergencies (sepsis, meningitis, necrotizing fasciitis). The legal focus in malpractice cases is on the serious infections — those where delayed diagnosis causes deterioration, permanent injury, or death that timely diagnosis would have prevented.

The standard of care requires physicians to consider infection in patients presenting with fever, elevated inflammatory markers, altered mental status, localized pain, or signs of systemic illness — and to promptly order appropriate laboratory studies, imaging, and treatment when infection is a reasonable diagnostic possibility. When a reasonably competent clinician would have identified the infection earlier, a departure from standard of care may exist.

The legal harm in these cases is the delay — the additional damage caused by the infection progressing untreated. Causation analysis compares what would have happened with timely diagnosis versus what actually occurred, establishing the incremental harm attributable to the delay.