In smaller metro areas, patients may move quickly between providers—urgent care to imaging, imaging to follow-up appointments, and follow-up to specialists. That “handoff” timeline matters legally because diagnostic errors often occur at the moments when information is transferred or acted upon.
Common Farmington-area scenarios include:
- Multiple visits in a short window (symptoms persist, but the correct diagnosis isn’t reached until later)
- Imaging and lab turnaround that creates a gap between a test being performed and a result being acted on
- Referral delays—sometimes caused by scheduling realities—compounding the harm of an initially incomplete working diagnosis
- Documentation and follow-up instructions that aren’t clearly communicated or are missed amid busy clinic schedules
If AI or automated systems were involved—such as risk scoring, clinical decision support, triage routing, or assisted documentation—those tools can influence what gets ordered, how quickly results are reviewed, and what gets flagged for escalation.


