Many diagnostic errors in real life aren’t one dramatic mistake—they’re a chain of smaller failures. In Marion, families commonly describe a pattern like:
- Symptoms start, then the patient is told to “monitor,” “return if worse,” or wait for a test result
- The patient returns a few days later as symptoms escalate
- A follow-up or referral takes time, and the abnormal finding isn’t treated as urgent
- The correct diagnosis arrives only after the condition progresses
When AI-assisted tools are part of the workflow—risk scoring, imaging triage support, lab interpretation support, or clinical decision prompts—the risk is that the tool’s suggestion gets treated like certainty rather than one input that still requires clinician verification.
The legal question is whether the care team met the expected standard of care at each handoff, not whether the final diagnosis was correct.


